This format is not supported on Mac devices and you will not be able to access the hard drive. Tips for Formatting WD Elements for Mac?īy default, a WD Elements HDD cannot work on Mac computers as they are formatted in NTFS format. How to Recover Formatted WD Files on Mac? Verify Disk, on the other hand is useful because it allows you to check your directory structure without having to boot from the DVD or another volume. There are a couple of spurious errors which is probably what you see. If it reports Permissions have been repaired.' then they are repaired. There is no need to ever 'Verify Permissions', it is a waste of time.

Right now I'll even accept 'Half Smart', 'Clever' and '**** - Why Didn't I Think Of That' answers ! Whatever course of action I take to correct these problems - I would like the knowledge that I have a full backup to restore from if things 'head south' while I look to correct the HD permission issues.Īnyone out there with some REAL SMART ideas that can help me out here ? AND it appears I have permission errors on my internal HD. I can't do a TM backup on the old Firewire disk - due to the program errors. I can't perform a Time Machine backup - as it can't see the maxtor disk. I can't format the maxtor external disk in order to manually copy over my disk content, it doesn't even show up in disk Utility or in Finder. Ran Verify again and it still reported some permission errors. I did, and this stated it fixed a few things. I ran 'Verify Disk' on my internal macbook HD and it reported some permission errors and mis-reported file sizes and told me to 'Repair Disk'. I naturally thought there was a prob with the ext drive, so knowing that I had at least a good full back-up on there, bought a new ext drive (larger) to perform a full backup on so I could reformat the firewire drive and utilise it elsewhere - but got errors when I tried to set it up as a Time Machine drive seconds after I took it out of the box. Errors were (not verbatim) 'error writing files' & 'unknown error'. I had noticed some strange errors a week ago when Time Machine was reporting an error saying it had failed (this was using a nother external firewire drive). I'm getting the same errors from both my USB ports when I try to format a brand new Maxtor 1TB drive.

Format wd external hard drive