Reformatting Your Drive

You may need to reformat your drive if the current drive format is not supported by your computer operating system. For example, if you are attempting to plug a Macintosh (HFS/HFS+) backup drive into a Windows system (NTFS) or vice versa. To continue, you must reformat the partition on your backup drive.

Caution: Reformatting your drive destroys all of the data on the drive. If you have used the drive on another computer with another operating system, make sure that you no longer need any of the data on the drive before you reformat it.

To format your drive for your operating system:

1. Click Back to Start to close the Unreadable WD SmartWare™ Drive screen to redisplay the What Would You Like to Do? message.
2. Close the the Welcome to WD SmartWare screen to stop the software installation procedure.
3. Use your computer system's disk management utility to initialize your backup drive and create a partition compatible with your operating system.
4. After initializing your backup drive and creating a partition compatible with your operating system, install the WD SmartWare backup software by doing one of the following:

• Disconnect and reconnect the back up drive.
• Navigate to the WD SmartWare Virtual CD (VCD) and double-click the WD SmartWare.exe file.