Anyone good with external hard drives?
I have a WD “My Passport” external hard drive. I have a Mac. I use a backup program, “Super Duper,” that does not recommend unplugging the hard drive during a backup. Well, I had to, and now it’s screwed up.
It says there is no room left, but I know there is. Thus, it won’t let me put anything on it. What can I do to fix it? Is all hope lost?
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I did that once, I had to reformat my hard drive and lost all my data. was one of the worst days. However mine was on a PC not Mac so there could be some magic way of fixing it through Mac that I am unaware of. since then I have backed up my hard drive onto a server.
@bongo I am trying to find a friend with mac hard drive space to deposit everything on it so I can reformat. Did that solve the problem, besides losing everything? How does one go about reformatting?
Will it let you take anything off it? getting your data off would be a good start.
on PC you just right click where the hard drive is under ‘my computer’, click on format and follow instructions, Im afraid im pretty useless when it comes to Macs so it is most likely very different.
It did solve the problem yes. Maybe try putting your information on a disk – when I did that to my hard drive it wouldnt let me move any of the files.
sorry i cant be of more help. Macs are far too expensive for me!
Your drive should have come with a set of tools on it or on a cd. If you had to wipe them, download them again.
On a pc I can access command code and reformat it—anything similar on mac?
I have a terrabyte MyBook which solves a lot of my problems. If you got one of those, you could use it as a “mixing bowl” for your smaller drive.
You can also offload to “the cloud” if you have a decent internet connection although it would be slow. Look at SugarSync
I think I’m going to temporarily dump files somewhere and try to reformat, but I can’t figure out how. Does anyone know how to reformat anything on a mac that might help me figure out how? The instructions and everything are at home, I’m at school.
Formatting drives on a mac. I’m not sure.
This might help
Disk utility also has repair options that you might try before fomatting.
Search through all the menus and options of the backup program and see if there is any way to delete the backup contents. If that doesn’t work, reformatting the external drive and removing and then reinstalling the backup program might be necessary.
What you need to do is get all of the info that is on your drive onto another drive or computer so you have a clean backup. Make sure all of your files are there before you do anything else.
After that point you can try to fix the issue or erase/reformat the drive.
You can do that using Disk Utility. (Located Applications -> Utilities -> Disk Utility)
Select the disk and then you can do First aid or erase.
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