Passport Hard drive Locked on Personal Laptop

Cosmic_Rust

Commendable
May 6, 2016
1
0
1,510
Hello!
I have a Western Digital My Passport Ultra 1TB external hard drive which I use on multiple computers for schoolwork.
The hard drive works on every computer I've used it on BUT my personal Macbook Pro laptop. On other desktop computers, both Windows and iOS, I can save files to the hard drive and edit existing files no problem. But, on my laptop, the hard drive refuses to let me edit any files or save any files to it.
When I try to drag anything to it, the file just floats back in place as if the hard drive icon isnt' even there. When I try to do a File->Save As, I get a warning that the action is not possible.

I haven't been able to figure out why this is. It shouldn't be broken because there are no problems on other computers. Has anyone seen this before an fixed it?

Thanks!
 
Solution
Most likely the drive is formatted GPT or NTFS. Use the pc and copy your files back to it. Reformat the drive as exfat and then copy your files back in. It should now work with both 'brands' as exfat is supported on them.

popatim

Titan
Moderator
Most likely the drive is formatted GPT or NTFS. Use the pc and copy your files back to it. Reformat the drive as exfat and then copy your files back in. It should now work with both 'brands' as exfat is supported on them.
 
Solution
Yeah, OS X can read NTFS drives, but can't write to them.

If you intend to share a drive between PC and Mac, you should format it as exFAT. Unfortunately, this will erase all the data on it. So you will have to first copy all your data off the drive, reformat it as exFAT, then copy the data back.