HFS external HD not openable windows 10

[americanboyhamilton]

Hi.
I have a 1tb mypassport by WD formatted in Mac OS journaled and I have trouble opening it with my Asus N56V laptop running windows 10.
I am planning to connect my HD to a wireless Hub on a "mission" to try an render my house as cable-free as possible. The only problem is that this Hub doesn't work with hsf formatted drive so I'm trying to change the format and in order to do so I need to momentairly place all the files I stored on my windows Laptop's HDD.
The drive works perfectly and is recognized on my Macbook air, but when I plug , it into the windows machine it is recognized as a connected usb drive, but I am unable to open it even with HFS explorer, Transmac, or the Full Paragon hfs explorer suite. Moreover when I try and open the Disk utility/manager tool on windows 10, I am unable to assign a Letter to the volume, so I think this is the main problem that stops the recognizing process. I don't know if it is relevant, but this mypassport drive used to be encrypted and the location of my time machine backup on my previous Macbook Air. Thinking the problem could be the encryption, I fully decrypted the HD, but no progress has been done since.
Thanks for reading and I really hope you can help me.
Kind Regards

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Welcome to the community, americanboyhamilton!

I'm sorry to hear about your connectivity issues with the WD My Passport, but since all the third-party file-system readers are unable to recognize the drive on your Windows laptop, maybe you should consider re-formatting (exFAT/FAT32) or at least partitioning the external HDD (so that one partition is in HFS+ for your Mac OS; and one in NTFS for your Windows OS).

If you've recently updated to Windows 10, then I'd recommend you to try uninstalling and re-installing the WD Passport as a device from Device Manager ( http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc725782.aspx ). I'd also check the laptop manufacturer's website for any USB hub driver updates for your model.

As for the hardware encryption, you cannot remove it and it shouldn't affect the connectivity. This feature of the external drive is basically there to keep your data safe by making it impossible to be accessed without the original My Passport enclosure. Either way, if you want to change the file system of the HDD, you should do it from your MacBook.

I believe your issue lies in the file system itself, and I'm also not entirely sure how compatible those third-party 'file-system' readers are with Windows 10. I'd suggest you to try plugging the drive in a different computer running Windows 7/8/8.1 and see how accessible it would be from there.

Keep me posted though.
SuperSoph_WD