Jan 08, 2020 you can only read your elements external hard drive. Fix wd my passport for mac not showing upnot working on mac. The data recovery tool in question supports all western digital hard disk drives, such as my book pro, my book, wd elements, my book studio, etc. Format wd elements for mac and pc have your drive for both. Format an external hard drive or usb flash drive for mac os x. Wd discovery software can also be used to manage your drive settings like reformatting, led control and more. Open the disk utility app and highlight your external hard drive. Mount wd my passport for mac in disk utility manually.
How to format wd external drive for mac apple community. Apple may provide or recommend responses as a possible solution based on the information provided. How do i reformat my imac internal hard drive and restore from a time machine backup. Pick your wd my passport in the external hard drive list. If you want to use your wd elements drive without any special software on your mac. A western digital wd external hard drive can be used with any computer once it has been formatted by the computers operating system. Format hard drive on windows 7 or earlier versions step 1 restart your computer and press f8 or del key to enter the bios settings. Once you open the disk utility app, you can see all the drives on your mac are listed on the lefthand sidebar. Easily use your wd my passport for mac and windows in 7 steps. Please note that reformatting the drive will erase all the information on the drive. This site contains user submitted content, comments and opinions and is for informational purposes only. Is there any fast way to reformat the wd portable hard drive and erase all the data on the hard drive. I have a 3tb hard drive that i removed from a nas that is only showing as 800mb on my mac.
Easily format wd my passport portable hard drive on mac. How to erase my passport and reformat wd portable drives. If you are running on mac, you will have to reformat the hard drives. Included wd discovery software 2 makes it easy to back up your photos, videos, and documents to the easystore portable drive. Yes, its recommended to format the drive on a windows computer.
Rightclick the hard drive and choose wipe hard drive. Sometimes, hard drives cannot be automatically mounted in disk utility, even though mac has detected the hard drive. Because the file system on the wd passport for mac external hard drive is a mac os extended journaled file system. Dec 29, 2015 the instructions below are for windows 10, but other versions of windows from windows 7 and up can also format an external drive as exfat for use with mac as well. After doing so, i was still unable to utilize the drive unable to create new folders, dragdrop anything. It will list all the hard drives and devices on your mac computer. Hi, when i first plugged in my new wd easystore 2 tb portable drive, i installed the necessary software off the drive.
Western digital provides data storage solutions, including systems, hdd, flash ssd, memory and personal data solutions to help customers capture and preserve their most valued data. How to format a wd hard drive to exfat or fat32 file system. Or you can choose wipe hard drive to completely delete the hard drive. If your product is not listed above, please visit the product page.
Getting the mac version saves some time for the mac user. Not without some third party software or without reformatting. If you want to create multiple partitions on your external hard drive in fact, you should for better file organization, heres a stepbystep guide. What is important is if you are using a pc you use a pc formatted drive, but if you are using a mac you should use a preformatted for mac drive, it will make your life easier. Select the unmountable wd external hard drive and click erase on the top. Hence, you must backup your important files before reformatting the drive if you want to save them. Select the wd portable hard drive you want to erase. Then, you follow these steps to erase western digital portable hard drive. A western digital external hard drive can be used on both windows and mac osx. Nov 02, 2016 the only difference between the mac and pc versions is the initial formatting and preinstalled software suite which can be downloaded from western digital. How to format a hard drive windows 10, 8, 7, vista, xp. I then tried reformatting it by erasing and setting the format from windows nt file system ntfs to mac os extended journaled for my macos sierra version 10. Today, we will introduce an easy, secure and efficient way to reformat wd portable hard drive. How to properly formatreformat a hard drive for mac os.
How to format wd my passport for mac and pc easeus. Format wd my passport for mac, 10 quick steps mactakeawaydata. You can only read your elements external hard drive. Step 2 follow the steps above to format the drive, and then you can use it with time machine on your mac system. Jul 19, 2014 how do i reformat my imac internal hard drive and restore from a time machine backup. Connect it, power it up, go to disk utility in applicationsutilities, select the wd disk on the left, go to the erase tab, and choose mac os. I have downloaded an ses driver and tried to reformat the drive on my mac as nfts and fat, but it does not seem to help. Then yes you need to put the wd elements drive in a format your mac can read and write to. And yes if you want to use your wd elements drive for a time machine backup. Easy steps to erase western digital portable hard drive. If you have not yet embarked on this project, consider this.
The system tells you what key to press during the restart, so pay attention to your screen and be quick at pressing the right key. The software should run automatically once you finished the installation process. However, you need to make doubly sure that you complete a quick format. I have an imac 20 mid 2007 with a problematic hard drive. Reformatting a drive on windows is a pretty straightforward process. But unfortunately it bit the dust and i decided to get a pc.
If first aid cant repair the wd hard drive, or disk utility doesnt recognize the volumes of the drive, probably, the. There are specific thirdparty systems, like digital camcorders, and sony playstation 3, which need the drives to be formatted in either fat32 or exfat format to perform read from and. How to fix wd hard drive not recognized on mac without. How to format a western digital external hard drive for a mac. Wd 2tb black my passport for mac portable external hard drive. A quick format only deletes the organizational structure of the files on the drive, without removing the actual files. Feb 08, 2020 how to partition an external hard drive on mac. Western digital on the other hand has the mybook ultra, which has automatic cloud backup that doesnt work on a mac, and turbo drivers of which everybody who had installed them wasnt too fond of. Out of the both its not mac compatible, but you can format it for use. So its possible that youll see the wd my passport for mac drive not mounting in disk utility. A hard drive or hard disk can be used in any type of computer, whether for pc windows or for mac.
I can find it under device manager and disk management but thats it. Okay, now lets start with the method to erase the western digital portable hard drive. Step 1 open finder, applications, then go to utilities and disk utility. Back up all important information on the drive before beginning.
Formatting an external hard drive would erase everything on it. This formatting is also known as mac os extended journaled file system. How to reformat my external hard drive for windows 10. In order to reformat wd portable hard drive and permanently erase the data on the wd portable hard drive, we strongly recommend you to use this tool super eraser to help you reformat. Hope this tutorial can help to fix wd external hard drive not mountingshowing uprecognizeddetected on mac. The instructions below are for windows 10, but other versions of windows from windows 7 and up can also format an external drive as exfat for use with mac as.
Wd portable hard drive reformatting software for windows mac. Vishal updated on april 21, 2020 mac hard drive recovery 19 comments 6 min read. Need to reformat wd hard drive for mac if you connect your wd hard drive without reformatting, youll be unable to copy files to the disk as mac read only supports ntfs file system. I think it is necessary to reformat the wd portable hard drive and permanently erase my private data. How to format external hard drive mac 2 simple methods. Bonus tip data recovery from formatted hard drive on mac. Now, i will show you the two methods to format wd my passport portable hard drive on mac.
Now either because of time, corruption or because it may have been formatted for a mac when i plug it into my pc i cant access it. To format an external hard drive for mac with time machine, you must follow the steps below. This is useful if a drive is being used under both operating system osto move files between the two environments. Reformatting 3tb wd my book for mac to windows wd community. Tutorial on how to format a western digital elements harddrive for a mac. How to properly format reformat a hard drive for mac os. Should i just wait until i get the new laptop and attempt to reformat the drive on it. Wd 2tb my passport for mac portable external hard drive, usbcusba wdblpg0020bbkwese wd 2tb my passport portable external hard drive, black wdbyvg0020bbkwesn add to cart. The reason is perhaps that seagate external hard drive has been well known for a long time as one of the most reliable drives for storing data. When you are a mac user the chances of reformat get higher and when digital external hard drive it arises much more. Now in this interface, you will see a format option. All is set, then you can go ahead to format the drive on your mac.
Wait while first aid verifying and fixing possible errors of the wd hard drive. Format external hard drive for mac with disk utility. Sometimes, there will be a need to learn how to reformat my passport for mac, so once youre acquainted with formatting, you should enlighten yourself on how to reformat wd my passport for mac. Reformatting a western digital my passport hard drive to function well on windows and macintosh systems is neither timeconsuming nor technologically demanding. Format your western digital my passport external hard drive to fat32 or exfat format so to transfer the data between a mac and windows system conveniently. For a hard drive to be able to be read and written to in both a pc and mac. Formatting a wd external hard drive does not require any additional software. Reformatting the hard drive really seemed to speed things up and make it work just like the first day i. How to reformat western digital portable hard drive.
How to format an external hard drive with pictures wikihow. I now have a pc with windows 8 and it does not find the hard drive in explorer. Disk utility is a mac application, you can run it on your mac. The version of the western digital external drive sold in a for mac guise does not work on windows. Please see the link below for instructions on how to format the drive on a windows computer. A lot of people including you, storing important data on seagate external hard drive instead of on your pcmac hard drive. In this situation, you can manually mount the hard drive. Wd 2tb black my passport for mac portable external hard. The first thing you must do is downloading the software aweeraser. How to format a hard drive for both windows and mac.
First to format your wd elements external drive to mac os extended journaled file system. The only difference between the mac and pc versions is the initial formatting and preinstalled software suite which can be downloaded from western digital. Prior to 2010 when i started buying mac, i used to reformat the hard drive on my windows computer once every year or two and do fresh installs of all the software i wanted on it. But keep in mind that you will be in need of software and proper knowledge of the process. Highlight your drive and click partition in disk utility. Before you can use it though, you need to properly format or reformat a hard drive so that it will become compatible or readable with the operating system that you are using. I have a western digital hard drive that i was using on my mac. You can get to know how to reformat wd hard drive for mac and pc from this post, if you need to use a western digital external hard drive, like. Just select the one you want to format and click on the erase tab. How to reformat an external hard drive without losing your. In such a case, its necessary to reformat wd hard drive to make it compatible with mac operating system.
Select the unrecognized wd hard drive from the sidebar. When finished, you can mount your wd external hard drive on mac and use it again. How to format or partition an external hard drive for mac. The easiest way is to drag it from one drive to another. Have tried disk utility and terminal diskutil but the hard drive keeps showing at the wrong size. The price of hard drives has really come down since you got the one you have. The wd elements desktop hard drive and the wd my book desktop hard drive and plug and play for windows, so this means it is ready to use as soon as you take it out of the box. Click on erase button to permanently erase all data on the western digital portable hard drive. Then your western digital external hard drive is ready to use on your mac and on your windows pc.
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