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WD Passport Shows Up on my Mac but not on Windows

Tags:
  • Western Digital
  • Macintosh
  • Storage
  • External Hard Drive
Last response: in Storage
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April 2, 2014 5:32:27 PM

I just built a new PC and my WD 1TB Passport external hard drive shows up fine on my Mac laptop but won't appear on Windows 8.1. It is recognized as a Device, but when I go to File Explorer, I can't see the drive. When I plug in a different WD Passport it shows up fine. Is there any way to fix this?

More about : passport shows mac windows

a b G Storage
April 2, 2014 5:43:51 PM

Did you format that drive on your Mac?
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April 2, 2014 5:46:26 PM

I'm not sure. When I bought the drive several years ago I only owned that Macbook Pro so it's quite possible I did. What would I need to do to make it recognizable by both?
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a b G Storage
April 2, 2014 6:00:52 PM

t0pher said:
I'm not sure. When I bought the drive several years ago I only owned that Macbook Pro so it's quite possible I did. What would I need to do to make it recognizable by both?


Then it probably formatted as HFS or HFS+ then. There are some free utilities that let you read HFS from windows but not write. OSX can read NTFS but not write.
If you plan on regularly moving data back and forth paragon's NTFS on Mac or HFS on windows are highly regarded and fairly cheap. You only need one.
https://www.paragon-software.com/home/hfs-windows/
https://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/

There are a couple of file systems both can read but they don't handle 1Tb very gracefully.

Edit: exFAT would work pretty well for you actually. but only if you have windows 7/8 and OSX snow leopard or newer
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April 2, 2014 6:22:16 PM

Thank you! I used the 10 day trial version of the software just now and it worked. What about FAT32? Is that readable and write-able by both? I don't have Snow Leopard.
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a b G Storage
April 2, 2014 6:27:58 PM

t0pher said:
Thank you! I used the 10 day trial version of the software just now and it worked. What about FAT32? Is that readable and write-able by both? I don't have Snow Leopard.


Awesome glad to hear that. You can but it will limit you to 4Gb files (you can't save any files larger than that to the drive).
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April 2, 2014 6:35:51 PM

Ok I'm going to format the drive to FAT32 once I finish transferring. Thanks again.
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a b G Storage
April 2, 2014 6:41:18 PM

t0pher said:
Ok I'm going to format the drive to FAT32 once I finish transferring. Thanks again.


no problem
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!