WD My Passport 500GB hard drive problem

Keggers2

Not sure if this belongs here or in consumer electronics but six in one, half a dozen in the other I figure.

Anyway, hey all, I'm having trouble with my portable hard drive. As I said in the title it's a WD (Western Digital?) My Passport 500GB portable drive. I've literally had it just over a month and haven't even used it much in that time. Anyway, I was asked to bring in some pictures I took of a match for school and, despite figuring that seeing as I work off a Mac it probably wouldn't work with the Windows 7 based PC's in school, I put the pictures on it and brought it in anyway. So I hand it to the guy in charge of the pictures for the school magazine and leave him at it. I get it back at the end of the day and he tells me that he couldn't get anything off it, which I'd assumed would be the case. However; when I get home and plug it into the Mac (it works purely through one USB connection, power and everything) I find that while it's powering up alright, my Mac just doesn't see it, no error message, no thumbnail, no anything. I might as well be plugging a brick into it.

It's really very odd and I'm completely at a loss as to what happened, could it have something to do with the hard drive being plugged into a Windows computer? Any and all info is much appreciated and thanks in advance!

riclad

UNLESS he has special software installed, pcs cant read
mac drives.
HE may have put it in and pc see,s nothing, no files,and not clicked,
remove drive/usb device.
i would not give out a 500gig drive in such a casual way,
you should have plugged drive into mac,burned photos onto cdr,or a 1gig usbdrive, or an sdcard.
Did you tell him ,this is a mac drive,
no windows ,pc format.
you could try drive in a pc that has http://www.thedailybuggle.com/read-mac-drive-windows/
a program as above installed.
hsf explorer is free,
reads mac hfs,hfsx ,hsfs plus drive ,file formats.
ASK him what he did.
You could have just uploaded them to online photo site,
flickr ,or a site like dropbox,
free online storage
https://www.dropbox.com/pricing
2gig account is free.

Odaise Gaelach

Keggers2 wrote: »

It's really very odd and I'm completely at a loss as to what happened, could it have something to do with the hard drive being plugged into a Windows computer? Any and all info is much appreciated and thanks in advance!

Just plugging it into a Windows PC wouldn't do anything to change the file system. Perhaps the disk is faulty, or the school magazine person did something to it he shouldn't have.

Anyway, try checking it with Disk Utility.

yoyo

If he didn't "Safely Remove" the drive its possible (but a slim one) thats what caused the problem. Otherwise as said above the disk could have got a knock/became faulty in the period it was loaned (much better off using disposable DVDs/CDs etc for this kinda stuff).
Windows shouldn't attempt writing to a unrecognised drive by default, which is why I find it odd that not safely removing hardware could cause it, you never know though, I wonder was it formatted actually? Try using a recovery program on it

Nick

Nick

riclad

its not a good idea to loan your drive to anyone,especially someone who uses a windows pc.
Use a 2gig drive or cdrs ,dvdr s to copy photos .

mordeith

riclad wrote: »

especially someone who uses a windows pc.

Vicious miscreants the lot of em