How To Format My Passport Wd For Mac Scheme
Hey there, Logan! You'd need to use a Mac to reformat your WD My Passport in a file system that can be read by Windows. The Mac is needed to store your files from the external HDD until you've reformatted it for use with Windows OS, because this change will result in erasing all the data on the drive. To avoid such future incidents, I recommend using the FAT32 file system because this format can be read and written to by both operating systems. Here's a tutorial that explains how to perform this: Hope this helps!
When I bought the drive, I was surprised to see that it didn’t support OS X out of the box. Yes, it had some software specifically made for OS X on it, but even that didn’t help. Turns out, it just wasn’t in the right format. These hard drives are customized to run well on Windows (as you’d expect), and they don’t run well with OS X.
How To Format My Passport External Hard Drive
4TB Passport for Mac 'Disk too large for partition scheme, failed' External Drives for Mac I just purchased a 4TB WD Passport external drive and have downloaded everything correctly, followed the instructions and it won’t let me erase and reformat the drive. Just got the WD MyBook 2TB. It's not the one specifically for Mac. It says it is compatible, needs to reformat. How easy is it to reformat?
So to get it running, what we’ll need to do is format it in Journaled format, which is OS X only format or MS-DOS (FAT), which means it will run with both OS X and Windows. If you’re only going to be using the hard drive on a Mac, I recommend you stick with Journaled.
Why You Need to Re-Format the External Hard Drive When I first got the hard drive, I wasn’t able to copy anything over to it (but I was able to copy from it). Disk Utility showed that it was formatted to MS-DOS (FAT) but I’m pretty sure it would have been NTFS instead. If you experience the same issue, your only recourse is to reformat it in one of two formats. Much like my WD My Passport Ultra, most external hard drives out there are customized to work with Windows, not OS X.
If you’re only going to use the external hard drive with Macs or you want to use it for Time Machine backups, format it in Mac OS Extended (Journaled). If you’re like me who also needs to use at least a part of the hard drive from Windows PCs, you’ll need to choose MS-DOS (FAT) format. But here you won’t get great support for Time Machine. Plus you can’t make partitions bigger than 2 TB or move files larger than 4 GB around. How to Re-Format the External Hard Drive First, connect the external hard drive, bring up Spotlight Search by using the keyboard shortcut Cmd + Space and type in Disk Utility. Press Enter and Disk Utility will launch. You can also find it in Utilities folder in Applications.
How To Format My Passport Wd For Mac Schemer
Now, from the left column select 1 TB WD My Passport (or whatever your hard drive name is), and click on the Erase tab. From here, in Format, select Mac OS Extended (Journaled), give it a name if you want, and click Erase. You’ll get a warning. Again, click Erase.
In a couple of seconds, you’ll have an OS X ready hard drive to go. Related: Check out our. How to Create Partitions I’m planning on using my hard drive for both Time Machine backups and to carry media files around. Internet explorer for mac os x. How to transfer funds between accounts in quicken 2015 for mac.
I might need to use the hard drive with Windows computers so I’m going to format one of the partitions as MS-DOS (FAT), fully aware of its limitations. The other one, for Time Machine backups, will be in Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format.
To create a partition, select the hard drive from the left column and click the Partition tab. From the drop-down below Partition Layout, select the number of partitions you want. Don’t go overboard here. Now, just below, you’ll see a visual representation of the partitions. You can use the breakpoint to change the size of the partitions by moving it up or down.
You can also click on a partition, give it a name and select the format. Can i restore my clients qb for mac 2014 to my accountants qb 2015. Once you’ve decided all the details, simply click the Apply button. From the pop-up, select Partition.
Disk Utility: Check out. What Do You Use It For?
What are you planning on doing with the external hard drive? Or just storing media? Share with us in our forums section. Last updated on 8 Feb, 2018.