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WD External Hard Drive Help

S

sayre

macrumors member
Original poster
May 4, 2009
39
0
Hello, I have a 2 TB WD My Book Essential Edition External Hard Drive and I am having major problems with it. From time to time I would have mounting problems, but this time my computer is saying it cannot read my external. I originally formatted the hard drive as FAT32. I do not need this format at all, as I am exclusively all mac now, so I moved all my valuable music files, e-books, etc onto another hard drive and tried to reformat this hard drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), for whatever reason I'm still getting major issues and on top of that it's telling me to restore. I've never restored before either, but I figured if I just wiped everything off and started all over, I would be good. I'm still having issues, here are some pictures of what it's saying:









I'm pretty frustrated and I'm even considering just buying a whole new hard drive under a different brand, since I cannot remedy this issue. Is this a user error here, or is my hard drive completely gone? Any help would be greatly appreciated and thank you in advance.
 
Last edited:
bruinsrme said:
Have to tried reformatting is for a MAC OS?
Click to expand...
Hmm? Are you asking me if I tried to reformat the drive for mac? I did, I selected Mac OS Extended Journal then erased it and I'm still getting issues.
 
try reformatting it is FAT, not FAT 32.
Then reformat in MAC

I am sitting here trying to think what I had to do with my Seagate. Had similar issues.
 
bruinsrme said:
try reformatting it is FAT, not FAT 32.
Then reformat in MAC

I am sitting here trying to think what I had to do with my Seagate. Had similar issues.
Click to expand...

Sorry, I meant MS-DOS (FAT), that is what I had originally formatted it as, on my iMac, when I first got the drive.
 
give me a sec and Ill throw a WD drive on here and see what tools are available
 
bruinsrme said:
perhaps reinstalling the tools might work
http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5419/

and here is the support page.
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=125&lang=en

I am new to mac. In windows you can delete the partition through a disk management service. Is there anything like that in mac?

I recall hooking up the WD to windows and deleting the partition then reformatting on the mac
Click to expand...
Thanks, I'll see if any of this works. I'm not sure there is anything like that on a mac, as far as the disk management service. I have one windows computer left in the house, how would I go about deleting the partition, if I had to go that far?
 
sayre said:
Thanks, I'll see if any of this works. I'm not sure there is anything like that on a mac, as far as the disk management service. I have one windows computer left in the house, how would I go about deleting the partition, if I had to go that far?
Click to expand...

give me a sec
 
control panel
>Computer Management
>>Storage
>>>Disk Management

When the window opens up right click on the drive and delete partition

then you can either format there or on the mac
 
hmmm unfortunately I can't erase either of my WD drives at the moment as I am moving information from PCs to the NAS
 
Can you try and format the external hard disk trough os x install dvd? The hard drive maybe failing, I had an hard drive that would work about 30% of the times, so it needed to be replaced, but since you already made an backup no worries there.

Check for clicking noises. You can erase the hard drive using dd, but if you are unfamiliar with it I would not recommend it since its dangerous tool to toy around with.
 
I already did a re-install of the OS X disc. I checked my macintosh hd after having issues with the external and it also showed some errors, but i was able to correct that problem by re-installing the disc, however I am still having issues with the external. I erased everything again on the external and verified and I saw green, everything was ok, so then I attempted to move my files over to my hard drive and now I'm getting Error Code - 36. Is there anyway to get around this error code? It seems to freeze or stop in the middle of a transfer of files, very frustrating.
 
blackburn said:
Looks like your external hd is toast:(
Click to expand...
Yeah. I'm disappointed that this hard drive did not last that long (maybe 2 years). Any good recommendations of hard drives that sync well with mac? I don't think I want to try western digital again.
 
sayre said:
Yeah. I'm disappointed that this hard drive did not last that long (maybe 2 years). Any good recommendations of hard drives that sync well with mac? I don't think I want to try western digital again.
Click to expand...
You might want to try OWC, http://otherworldcomputing.com/ I use a Mercury Elite Pro 500GB, so far it is good. I also use a WD My Book 500GB with no issues yet. Both of these are only backups HDs. Worth looking into OWC, might be pleasantly surprised to find something you want or need.
 
Thanks all for the information and the help, I really do appreciate it. I've been moving my files onto the drive, it seems I got all of my music and ebooks over quite nicely. When I tried movies though, that's when I started getting the Error Code - 36, so then I tried to move one movie file at a time over and that seems to be working, although I can't figure out why I can't just grab my whole folder and move it at once, this will be tedious, if not time consuming. I wonder why it won't let me drag my whole folder over, any ideas? I'm still probably going to look for another hard drive, just in case, now that this thing has made me a bit uneasy.
 
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