8
MY PASSPORT ESSENTIAL
USER MANUAL
USING THE DRIVE WITH A MAC – 42
Using the Drive with a Mac
The My Passport Essential drive that you have purchased is preformatted as a single
NTFS partition for compatibility with all updated Windows operating systems. If desired,
you can reformat it to HFS+J for Mac OS X operating systems. (You can also reformat a
Mac drive to NTFS.)
This chapter includes the following topics:
Reformatting the Drive
Installing on a Mac OS X Tiger/Leopard/Snow Leopard
Enhancing Performance with WD +TURBO
Managing the Drive on a Mac
Reformatting the Drive
Go to support.wdc.com. Refer to Knowledge Base Answer ID 3323 for reformatting the
drive to Mac OS X format. (See ID 3645 for formatting a Mac to the NTFS file system for
use on Windows XP and ID 3647 for formatting it for Windows Vista). See
“Troubleshooting” on page 51 for more information about reformatting a drive.
If you reformatted your drive for use with a Mac, follow the procedures below.
Installing on a Mac OS X Tiger/Leopard/Snow Leopard
1. Turn on your computer.
2. Connect the drive’s USB cable as shown in Figure 1 or Figure 2. The WD SmartWare
CD displays on the desktop and is listed under Devices in Finder.
The My Passport icon also displays on the desktop.
3. Double-click the WD SmartWare virtual CD.
Note: WD SmartWare software is provided in the form of a virtual CD (VCD) drive
on your My Passport drive. The VCD displays on your desktop and
behaves just like a physical CD. To view the contents of the VCD, such as
the documentation and some extra programs, right-click and select Open.
4. Mac OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard only: A message asks whether you want to
use the My Passport drive to back up with Time Machine. If you do not want to use
the Time Machine backup software, click Cancel. If you do want to use the Time
Machine backup software, click Use as Backup Disk. The My Passport icon now
displays as .
CAUTION! Reformatting the drive erases all its contents. If you have already
saved files on the drive, be sure to back them up before reformatting it.
