The drive now shows a huge amount of corrupted space and only 25 GB free, even though there is obviously nothing on it. MediaKit reports not enough space on device for requested operation. I chose the option that opened disk utility and tried again to erase the drive.

This time, the Mac said it could not recognize the disk. I followed the WD support suggestions–restarted my Mac, closed any open applications, and plugged the drive back in. This has happened before with WD drives on my Mac, but what happened next was odd. When I tried to delete the drive, it unmounted and gave me an error message. So I proceeded with the disk utility process. I can’t remember if it’s normal to only have read only permissions for a new drive. I was logged in with my Administrator account. When I attached this new drive, it showed up in the finder right away, but when I right-clicked and selected “get info” it showed that I had “read only” permission and didn’t show the padlock for making changes. I have a MacBook Pro, and I already have four working My Passport 2 TB drives that I use regularly with it as well as a 4 TB MyBook. I just purchased a 4 TB My Passport Ultra from Amazon.