There is no writable WD SmartWare partition available... please help!

[Robertz]

Hello everyone, I have read many reviews but still cant get something to solve this problem, i have been very happy with my extternal hard drive running on my Macbook pro, i put password on my drive, but a couple of days ago i lend the hard drive to a friend of mine that has PC then he tried to put some files into the drive but he couldnt do anything because i didnt give him my password. Today that i conected the hardrive to my Mac and when i try to back up files, appears this:

"There is no writable WD SmartWare partition available on this WD drive. This can occur if you are attempting to write to a WD drive formatted for a different operating system, or if the drive is locked.

Please make sure that this WD drive is formatted for the operating system you are currently working on, and that the drive is unlocked."

And apparently there is no info in my drive!! How could this happen, if i put a password to avoid this things? Is there anyway to solve this problem?  Thank you for your help

[Joe_S]

Did your friend reformat the drive? If you fail log in 5 times it gives the option of erasing the drive. Try and find out what your friend did. There  may be something fixable like corrupt partition data.

Joe

[Robertz]

Thanks for your answer, my friend told me that after the first time he couldnt access the drive he knew that i didnt gave him the password so he stopped trying.

So, do you think there´s still something to do? i had valuable data on my hardrive, and it seems that now it´s empty

[Joe_S]

I'll PM somebody familiar with Macs I don't know about them.

Joe

[ThePizzaMatrix · Accepted solution]

Your friend formatted the hard drive. Even without a password a Mac external drive won't work on a PC because of the file system (Macs use HFS+, and does not work with Windows). If your drive is empty and there's no writable partition, all points to this even if your friend says otherwise.

To make it work on your Mac again, go to disk utility> select the drive> go to partition> select 1 partition> GUID partition table under options and then format it again to make it work on your Mac. The data is long gone already... But try a data recovery program like Disk Warrior on your Mac and see if you get any luck.

With or without a password, if you lend your Mac drive to a PC friend, he/she won't see the data unless you have formatted your external drive previously in a way that the 2 computers can understand and share (Like FAT32 or exFAT) or unless your friend has a specific program made to read Mac drives on Windows (Like HFSExplore).

[Robertz]

Geeez... well hope to get some files that i really need with Mac Recovery... Thanks for your helpful and sad (for me) reply

[ThePizzaMatrix]

Disc Warrior is very powerful, it's the way to go.