I used my WD Passport HD to back up my DVR recordings on my Dish receiver before it got replaced. There was nothing on the Passport which was formatted with the WD Smartware, but was reformatted with the Dish formatting needed to save the DVR media recordings.

Now when I try to backup my laptop with the Passport, it is not recognized at all. I cannot format it as a writable drive because the Passport is not even recognized on an external drive.

How to Format a Drive for Mac & PC Compatibility. Formatting a Drive for Mac OS X & Windows PC Compatibility. This works with any hard drive, flash drive, SSD, USB drive, or just about any other storage type that is accepted by both a Mac and Windows machine, and the entire process is performed in Mac OS X.

I can connect the Passport to Dish and it reads my DVR recordings fine. How can I get the Passport to be recognized on a PC again?

I am fine losing whatever DVR recordings are saved. Run Windows Disk Management (if you are using Windows Vista or later, you can search for it by this name; if using XP, type compmgmt.msc in the Run menu). The bottom half of the window shows you physical drives (as distinct from 'drive letters' as seen in 'My Computer' etc). Disk 0 is usually your system drive, and if you have any other internal drives they will be listed below it. Your WD drive should be listed below that (but above DVD drives etc, if you have any). If it is not shown, there's a problem in the physical (hardware) communication between the computer and the hard drive - perhaps your PC's USB drive does not produce enough power to power it.

If it is listed, the partitions that make up the drive will be shown on the right. You may see 'RAW' (the PC does not know what to make of the drive), 'Unknown Partition' (Windows does not recognise the partition type) or something else. At any rate, you should be able to right-click on that area and delete the existing partition if any ('Delete Volume'). Now right click again and create a new partition.

You will now need to format the partition. If you ONLY want to use the drive with your PC, choose to format it as NTFS. Otherwise, choose the FAT32 format which is recognised by most devices (though perhaps not by your DVR, by the sound of it).

Hey everybody! So, I'd like to get this very popular drive: But technically these are for Windows, and they make a Mac version here: I'd rather get the black version, and I read some of the reviews stating that you can just reformat the Windows version and it will work fine for Mac.

While I'm sure I could get it to mount, would there be any possible performance issues by doing this? In other words, is there any reason to buy the Mac version, or are they identical, but just come formatted differently? Hey everybody! So, I'd like to get this very popular drive: But technically these are for Windows, and they make a Mac version here: I'd rather get the black version, and I read some of the reviews stating that you can just reformat the Windows version and it will work fine for Mac.

While I'm sure I could get it to mount, would there be any possible performance issues by doing this? In other words, is there any reason to buy the Mac version, or are they identical, but just come formatted differently? Click to expand.Do you have a 2012 Mac with USB 3? If not, and you have a Firewire 800 port, then you'll get better performance with a Firewire drive rather than USB.

E.g.however, Firewire is on the way out and you might not find one at the physical size and capacity you want, and will probably pay a bit of a premium. Plus, if you have an Air or a vanilla MacBook its USB or nothing. I've had one of these in the past.which was great because it fas FW800 [i[and[/i] USB3, but it was a bit overpriced and I don't think they do them bigger than 500GB. Thanks for all the advice. I'm only using this drive for extra storage/backups, so speed isn't really the focus, but I definitely want a USB 3.0 drive. I'm mostly concerned with reliability, and I'm really drawn to the My Passport series because of the WD Nomad case they make: I'm a very big fan of excessive protection when it comes to HDDs, so I'd plan on leaving in that case essentially all the time.

Just click the big red 'Download' button at the bottom and YTD instantly starts downloading. Download youtube video software for mac. Convert to different formats The Activity window shows you the status of your download and we found that downloading a three minute video took roughly one minute. You can now download in full 1080 HD quality, as well as much lower quality. As soon as you copy a YouTube or video link to your clipboard, it automatically detects this and places it in the URL field. You can also then play back videos you have downloaded straight from the Activity tab or by going into the Play tab.