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I have a Western Digital My Passport (external hard drive) and I had been using it to back up my Windows XP machine. The XP machine's hard drive crashed, so now I am left with the My Passport drive.

Will I be able to load My Passport onto a Windows 7 machine? What about a Mac? Does anyone have any experience with this? Was it a bad idea to use the Western Digital My Passport software?

Any input would be great. Thanks!

2 Answers 2

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You won't have any trouble reading the drive using a Windows 7 machine.

You shouldn't have any trouble reading the drive on a Mac either. If the drive was formatted using FAT32, which is likely the default, a Mac can read and write just fine to it. If it's formatted NTFS, which is the Windows standard, it should be able to read, but not write.

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    Macs should read NTFS fine; you may need additional software to write to it. see this answer for more: superuser.com/questions/53633/… Oct 15, 2009 at 16:49
  • I actually found a similar question at the same time, and updated the answer to reflect that. Oct 15, 2009 at 16:50
  • But does "My Passport" store the data in its own compressed format? I am afraid that the crappy "My Passport" software will need to be compatible with the OS in order to read the data. Anyone have experience with this?
    – joe
    Oct 15, 2009 at 18:15
  • It's very doubtful. I've never used the software myself, but I'd expect it to just be copying data straight over to the drive. If anything, it'd compress it into a known format, such as .zip. I see no reason why they'd reinvent the wheel just to prevent compatibility. Oct 15, 2009 at 19:42
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I found that my Western Digtal Passport WDXMS2500 is NOT compatible with Windows 7...I don't know why exactly. But it cannot connect...and who knows if it ever will.

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  • That's not possible, unless you've encrypted the WD Passport.
    – harrymc
    Oct 27, 2009 at 17:35
  • According to WD tech support it will not work under Win 7 at this time. I didn't encrypt it either. Not sure what kind of magic they do on those drives...but I have moved to from Vista to Vista box with no problem but it does not work on two Win 7 machines I've tried to use.
    – webjedi
    Oct 27, 2009 at 20:06
  • link to Discussion on subject...starts off during beta but last post was recent...still problems. i.nconspicuo.us/2009/02/05/…
    – webjedi
    Oct 27, 2009 at 20:35
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    It seems quite unbelievable that an external USB drive would need special (non-generic) drivers. My own WD Passport works very well on Win7.
    – harrymc
    Oct 28, 2009 at 10:36
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    Just got around to rebuilding this machine...and this go around it worked without a hitch...go figure.
    – webjedi
    Nov 3, 2009 at 15:42

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