HELP, Raspberry Pi 4 & WD My Passport Ultra

WD External and Portable SSD Portable SSD
1

I recently got my raspberry pi 4 and am having trouble using my external hard drive. I understand My Passport is only meant to be used on windows but can be altered to allow access. Please forgive me but I am really slow when it comes to understanding computer code :frowning: Any help would be greatly appreciated.

2

Helps if you tell us specifically what ā€œtroubleā€ you are having :thinking:

It can be used with anything you want really ā€¦ Itā€™s only been tested and guaranteed by WD to work with Windows, which doesnā€™t mean it wont work fine with other devices.

And it does not need ā€œalteringā€ as you say (whatever that means)

I have a WD 4TB My Passport Ultra USB (plus Passports and Elements portables) and they work fine with my Raspberry Pi 3B+ and will work fine when i get a Pi 4.

Drives are a mixture of NTFS and exFAT file system which RPi3 has no trouble seeing.

Have also used the My Passport Ultra with Android devices, Smart TVā€™s (Panasonic/Samsung) and PlayStation 4 games consoles ā€¦ with no troubles.

3

Hi

I have been trying to access My Passport Ultra on my Raspberry Pi 4 and having problems which I hope you can help with. I have been using my Passport Ultra as a backup device for my PC and as such have used the WD security lock features to ensure its safe if it gets lost. However, I wanted to also see if I could access it from my RP in case of problems with my PC and so did some googling and found references to people getting it working and providing an unlock capability through use of a package wdpassport-utils.py. I have followed the script provided involving loading various pre-req packages and then downloaded the wdpassport-utils.py.

When I plug the Passport Ultra in (using a powered USB hub) and use dmesg I can see the WD passport associated with /dev/sg1 and /dev/sg2. I think sg1 is the CDROM partition where the normal unlock tool lives but when I try and run the

~/wdpassport-utils.py -u -d /dev/sg2

the raspberry pi reports ā€œNo Western Digital Passport devices foundā€

The script had me install python-pip, python-devdev and lsscsi, all of which installed successfully, no warnings or errors. Then I did a pip install py-sg, again successfully, then I downloaded the wdpassport-utils.pys to my home directory and I changed the permissions to allow owner execute. Now I can run the utils by just typing the above command but get that message. If I try and run the utils using sudo at the dront then I get a messages saying I need to install py-sg (which was previously installed ok), if I run utils with sudo python in front then I get a message saying Import error: No module named pyudev.

Would you be able to explain how you have got the WD My Passport Ultra to work with your Raspberry Pi?

Any help much appreciated

Thanks

John

4

I just plugged it into the Raspberry Pi and it worked.

Have bought a Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB) just recently ā€¦ and that works too.