How to Format a WD External Hard Drive for My Mac?
By: Seerat Ejaz
Tags: External Hard Drive, Mac, Formatting, Hard Drive Data Recovery, Western Digital

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Ø Introduction:

In this article, you will learn how to format a WD (Western Digital) external hard drive for your macOS. It is highly recommended that you back up your files before starting any format operation on your system as lost files cannot be recovered. For your further information, some common questions will be included in the FAQ section.

· Steps to Format a WD External Hard Drive for Your Mac:

Follow these steps to format a WD External Hard Drive for your Mac.

1. Prepare Mac to format WD elements

When you connect a WD drive to your Mac. The operating system will take some time to detect drive and data. Wait for it and once the process is done, you will see a new hard drive icon on your desktop.

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2. Open the Disk utility

The disk utility is used to format your WD elements. You can find it in your Mac, operating system.

i) Select the new hard drive icon and open the “Finder” window on macOS Dock.

ii) Select, “Utilities” under the “Go” tab from the menu bar. The / Applications / Utility folder will now appear in Finder.

iii) From “Utilities”, select, “Disk Utility”.

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3. Click WD hard drive

Scroll to the sidebar and click on WD Hard Drive.

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4. Look at the Erase button.

When you click on the Erasing button, then you must fill in some settings first.

Select, “Erase’’ to open that window.

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5. Filling WD formatting options.

i) Give a name to the external hard drive before WD formatting.

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ii) Choose the drop-down menu for “volume format” and select, “ex-FAT File System” or “MS-DOS (FAT)”. you should prefer “ex-FAT’’ for format.

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6. Choose the “Erase’’ Button.

Your formatting will start When you click the “Erase’’ button on the popup window. After this, all data of the Mac drive will be removed, and the drive will be reformatted in ex-FAT format.

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7. Click the WD Elements drive icon on the desktop.

You will see that your WD Element Drive is empty. Now, you can regularly use it as a drive-in OS X or macOS.

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Ø Important Note: Backup files formatting your hard drive

It might be possible that you accidentally format your “WD My Passport” external drive, and later wish you did not do so. When you mistakenly format the drive, it could damage your important data Such as video files, documents, photos, audio files, etc. That is why you should back up all your files before formatting your hard drive. You can take backup by simply transferring them or copying them from an external drive to another. You can use the “Restore” feature in your extra drive to move the contents of the drive you want to format into it.

Ø Frequently Asked Questions

· Why doesn’t my wd external hard drive work on my Mac out of the box?

Your WD external hard drive comes in a format called NTFS. NTFS will plug and play only on a Windows computer but not on a MAC. It means that although you can connect the NTFS drive to your Mac, your MAC can only read it and does not write onto it.

· Why is Mac not recognizing Wd external hard drive?

When you plug in your WD external hard drive into Mac and Mac is not recognizing it, then you can try the following:

o Insert it in another port on your Mac computer.

o Check your USB cable connection. A bad USB cable will cause the drive not to shown up.

o Ensure you have selected the option to show “External Drive” and “Hard Drive” in your finder preferences window.

o In the end, restart your Mac to see if this solves the problem.

· How to resolve WD external hard drive format error for Mac?

If you are getting an error while trying to format your hard drive on Mac Disk Utility, then follow these steps to resolve this error:

o Be sure that you select WD drive at the right place on the Disk Utility Window.

o Type these instructions on your “Mac Terminal” page

diskutil list

diskutil unmount disk force (paste copied items here)

The erase process has failed. Select “Done’’ to continue

Ø Tips for Effective Formatting

If you want to effectively format WD external hard drive on Mac, you should follow these tips:

· Be sure, you choose the right file format to format your drive. Some of the other systems like Sony, PlayStation3, Digital Camcorders, needed their drives to be formatted in especially ex-FAT or FAT32 formats. This is the only way they can read and write.

· ex- FAT support maximum volume size and file size of 128 PIB.

· If you regularly use an external drive on both Windows PC and Mac, it is more likely to be damaged. This requires that you always back up your important files before sharing any file between the two computer systems.

· If the WD external hard drive is formatted to ex-FAT or FAT32 formats, then It is very easy to move files or data between windows and Mac computers.

· You can prefer to select ex-FAT then FAT32.FAT32 is no unlimited therefore every computer user cannot use it.

Ø Learn about Formats and Schemes Mac Uses

While formatting on Mac, often the scheme you should choose is GUID Partition Map. However, the following are available formats that Mac uses and from which you can choose when formatting a drive:

· macOS Extended (Journaled)

It is considered the best format use because it supports all versions of Mac computers.

· exFAT:

This format is also preferred as it can be used on both Mac and PC.

· APFS (Apple File System)

It is only compatible with macOS 10.13 and later Mac versions

· MS-DOS (FAT)

It is usable for both Mac and PC, but you cannot transfer a file whose size is larger than 4GB.