So, you just bought an external hard drive or a portable SSD and wanted to use it on your Mac. But somehow, macOS doesn’t allow you to write data to the drive.
- How To Format Wd Elements Hard Drive For Mac And Pc
- How To Format Wd Elements For Mac And Pc
- How To Format Wd Elements External Hard Drive For Mac
- Western Digital Elements Mac
Format your WD Elements drive for both your home Mac and work Windows PC makes your life easier. Because you can move files between both. And you can find out how here. I have the WD Elements SE portable 1TB HD and my Samsung TV won’t read any of the files on it. However, it DOES see that it the HD is there. I have 3 sorts of files on the har drive –.avi,.mv4 and.mp4. The HD is formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled). All three sorts of files work when I connect the HD to my computer (Mac). 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.
That’s all because it’s been initialized with Windows NT File System (NTFS), which is primarily for PCs. Apple Mac machines support a different file system.
In this post, I’m going to show you how to format your external drive for a Mac compatible file system i.e. Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Just follow this easy step-by-step guide and you’re all set.
Important note: If you have useful files stored on the external drive, be sure to copy or transfer them to another safe place prior to formatting. The operation will erase all data and your files will be gone for good. You could use a recovery program like Data Rescue to retrieve them, but the odds of recovery vary.
Pro tip: If your external drive has a large volume, like mine – a 2TB Seagate Expansion. I highly recommend you also create multiple partitions. I’ll also show you how to do that below.
Most External Hard Drives Are Initiated with NTFS
During the last several years, I’ve used several removable drives, including a 500GB WD My Passport, 32GB Lexar flash drive, and a few others.
Three weeks ago, I bought a brand new 2TB Seagate Expansion to backup my MacBook Pro before I updated to the latest macOS, 10.13 High Sierra (also see those High Sierra issues I encountered).
When I connected the Seagate to my Mac, the drive icon showed up like this.
When I opened it, the default content was all there. Since I wanted to use it on Mac, I clicked the blue logo with the text “Start_Here-Mac”.
It brought me to a webpage on Seagate’s site, where it clearly indicated the drive was initially set up to work with a Windows PC. If I wanted to use it with Mac OS or Time Machine backup (which is my intent), I’ll need to format the drive for my Mac.
I then right-clicked the external drive icon on Mac desktop > Get Info. It showed this format:
Format: Windows NT File System (NTFS)
What is NTFS? I’m not going to explain here; you can read more on Wikipedia. The problem is that on macOS, you can’t work with files saved on an NTFS drive unless you use a paid app Paragon NTFS for Mac.
How to Format an External Drive to Work with Mac (from NTFS to Mac OS Extended)?
Note: The tutorial and screenshots below are based on macOS Sierra 10.12.5. They might be different if your Mac has a different version.
Step 1: Open Disk Utility.
The quickest way to do this is a simple Spotlight search (click the search icon on the upper right corner), or go to Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility.
Step 2: Highlight your external drive and click “Erase”.
Make sure your drive is connected. It should show up on the left panel under “External”. Select that disk and click the “Erase” button, the one highlighted in red in the screenshot below.
Step 3: Select “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” in Format.
A new window will pop up asking which file system you’d like to format the external drive to. By default, it’s the Windows NT File System (NTFS). Select the one shown below.
Pro tip: If you want to use the external drive for both Mac and PC, you can also select “ExFAT”. Learn more about the differences between these file systems from this thread.
By the way, you can also rename your external drive.
Step 4: Wait until the erasing process is complete.
For me, it took less than a minute to format my 2TB Seagate Expansion.
You can also check to see if the format was successful. Right-click on the icon for your external drive on Mac desktop, then select “Get Info”. Under “Format”, you should see text like this:
Congratulations! Now your external drive has been formatted to be fully compatible with Apple MacOS, and you can edit, read, and write files to it as you want.
How To Format Wd Elements Hard Drive For Mac And Pc
How to Partition an External Hard Drive on Mac
If you want to create multiple partitions on your external hard drive (in fact, you should for better file organization), here’s a step-by-step guide:
Step 1: Highlight your drive and click “Partition” in Disk Utility.
Open the Disk Utility app and highlight your external hard drive. Make sure you select the disk icon right under “External”. If you select the one below it, the Partition option will be greyed out and become unclickable.
Step 2: Add partitions and allocate volume for each one.
After clicking “Partition”, you’ll see this window. Located on the left is a big blue circle with the name of your external drive together with its volume size. What you need to do next is click the add “+” button to increase the number of partitions on your external disk. Then allocate the desired volume to each partition. You can do that by clicking the small white circle and dragging it around.
After that, you can rename each partition and define a file system for it.
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Step 3: Confirm your operation.
Once you hit “Apply”, a new window pops up asking for your confirmation. Take a few seconds to read the text description to make sure it reflects what you intend to do, then click the “Partition” button to continue.
Step 4: Wait until it says “Operation successful.”
To check whether the operation is really successful, go to your Mac desktop. You should see multiple disk icons show up. I chose to create two partitions on my Seagate Expansion — one for backup, the other for personal use. You can find more info in this post: How to Backup Mac to an External Hard Drive.
That wraps up this tutorial article. I hope you find it helpful. As always, let me know if you have any issues during the formatting or partitioning process.
Summary: Have you received the error: 'The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer' on Mac? Don't worry, this article will focus on how to fix WD My Passport is corrupted or unreadable on Mac. To avoid the loss of important data, you'd better recover data from the unreadable WD My Passport with iBoysoft Mac Data Recovery.
WD My Passport external hard drive is able to work on Mac and Windows for data transferring or backup. It is popular for its auto backup and passport protection features, keeping your files and folders safe. However, there are times that the WD My Passport becomes unreadable or corrupted on Mac. You may be greeted with errors like 'The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer', which prevents you from accessing all data stored on the drive.
It's so frustrating when you meet this issue. If you are struggling to solve this issue, you will find a collection of verified troubleshooting steps.
- Table of contents
- 1. Causes of WD My Passport not readable on Mac error
- 2. How to fix 'WD My Passport unreadable' on Mac error?
- 3. Conclusion
Note: If you received the disk not readable error with three options: Initialize, Ignore and Eject, please don't select 'Initialize'. Initializing the drive will erase all of the data that is currently sitting on the drive, which makes it difficult to recover data.
Causes of WD My Passport not readable on Mac error
Let's at first take a look at the complaint from community.wd.com:
'My WD My Passport 2TB Portable External Hard Drive has suddenly become unreadable on my laptop (MacBook Pro Server with macOS 10.12 Sierra) and I have tried on a MacBook Pro 2011 running 10.13 High Sierra with the same results. Any suggestions to fix my unreadable WD drive?'
The good news is, even though you have been prompted with an error message, at least your WD My Passport drive is recognized. There are many reasons that can lead to a drive not being readable, but essentially this is because the internal file system is damaged. Some of the possible reasons for this error are described as follow:
- Mac malfunctions
- Outdated drivers
- Faulty connections
- Write-protected drive
- The WD My Passport is not formatted
- An internal file system error or bad sectors
- Virus/malware infection to your WD My Passport
- Incompatibility issue between your WD My Passport and Mac machine
- Accidental interruption or removal of your WD My Passport during transferring data
How to fix 'WD My Passport unreadable' on Mac error?
In most cases, the issue can be repaired with a simple initialize. But this operation will remove all data stored on this drive. Are there any other ways to fix WD My Passport unreadable issue on Mac? Of course, just try these solutions one by one:
Solution 1: Re-insert the WD My Passport
The first and foremost thing is to remove the WD My Passport safely from Mac and then re-plug it into the USB port properly. If the external hard drive mounts and appears on the left sidebar of Finder, then you can access the drive. However, if the WD drive still won't mount or the error persists, continue with the next method below.
Solution 2: Check the Mac computer
The next step is to check whether your Mac machine has a problem or not. Just connect a different storage device to your Mac. If this error still pops up, the problem may refer to your Mac machine, you can restart your Mac to see if everything works well. Otherwise, if you can see the other drive in Finder, the problem is associated with the previous WD My Passport.
Solution 3: Check if the WD My Passport is encrypted
The WD My Passport for Mac corrupted or readable issue can also happen if the drive is encrypted by BitLocker. By default, the Mac computers cannot recognize a BitLocker encrypted drive, which means you are unable to read or write BitLocker encrypted drive on Mac.
You can insert the drive in a PC and then turn off the BitLocker encryption so that it can be read on Mac. In addition, you can access a BitLocker encrypted drive with the help of a third party tool.
Solution 4: Update Mac drivers
Drivers enable one or more hardware devices to communicate with the computer's operating system. Fl for mac. If drivers are out-of-date, a variety of issues will happen such as the disk not readable error. Apple handles all system and driver updates for your system. To check if any updates are available, please do the following:
- Step 1: Go to Apple menu and select 'App Store'.
- Step 2: Click on the 'Updates' button located on the top pane.
- Step 3: Check available updates for your system and applications.
Solution 5: Repair the WD My Passport in Disk utility
Disk Utility is a built-in used to erase, format or manage internal disks and external storage devices. The most important feature of Disk Utility is First Aid, which helps detect and repair any issue with your disk. Here is how to run First Aid on your Mac to repair the unreadable WD My Passport:
- Step 1: Open Disk Utility from your /Applications/Utilities folder.
- Step 2: Select the unreadable WD My Passport in the left side bar.
- Step 3: Select the 'First Aid' tab.
- If Disk Utility tells you the disk is about to fail, back up your data and replace the disk. You can't repair the disk. Otherwise, continue to step 4.
- Step 4: Click Run.
- If Disk Utility reports that the disk appears to be OK or has been repaired, you're done. Otherwise, you have to back up as much of your data as possible.
Solution 6: Recover data and erase the WD My Passport
If the error still exists, you have no choice but erase the WD My Passport. But keep in mind that you will lose all data store on this disk. If you didn't back up important data, you should get lost data back with free Online data recovery software at first.
Step 1: Recover data from the unreadable WD My Password on Mac
If you are not sure which data recovery tool you can trust, iBoysoft Mac Data Recovery is highly recommended to recover data from the unreadable or corrupted WD My Passport. This free Mac data recovery can scan and recover data from unreadable SD cards, internal Macintosh hard drives, external hard drives, USB flash drives, etc. iBoysoft Mac Data Recovery provides a complete Mac data recovery solution even if your Mac won't boot/turn on, your device is failing, inaccessible or has lost a partition.
Moreover, iBoysoft Mac Data Recovery can also recover recently or permanently deleted files, recover data from formatted hard drives, recover data from unmountable hard drives, and recover data from inaccessible drives, etc. This software supports recovering documents, photos, videos, emails, and music files. It's fully compatible with macOS Catalina 10.15/Mojave 10.14/High Sierra 10.13/Sierra 10.12 and Mac OS X 10.11/10.10/10.9/10.8/10.7.
1. Download and install iBoysoft Mac Data Recovery on Mac.
2. Launch iBoysoft Mac Data Recovery.
3. Select the unreadable WD My Passport and click 'Next' to search for lost files.
4. Preview the searching results, choose those you want and click 'Recover' to get them back.
5. Go over to ensure all lost files have been successfully restored.
Step 2: Erase the unreadable WD My Password in Disk Utility
How To Format Wd Elements For Mac And Pc
1. Open Disk Utility from /Applications/Utilities folder.
2. Click on View > Show All Devices in the menu bar.
3. Select the WD My Passport from the list of devices on the left pane and click the'Erase' button on the top.
4. Name your drive, select a file system format and then click 'Erase'.
Now that you've formatted the WD My Passport, the disk unreadable error will be resolved and the drive can be ready to use. Then you can copy the recovered data back.
Solution 7: Ask data recovery service for help
How To Format Wd Elements External Hard Drive For Mac
However, if the solutions above don't fix the WD My Passport unreadable issue for you, or your WD My Passport even won't show up on Mac, it's probably the drive has been physically damaged. In that case, you should send it to a local data recovery service or replace it with a new one.
Conclusion
Western Digital Elements Mac
Hope these solutions have helped you fix the WD My Passport corrupted or unreadable issue. If you have any question about this article, stay in touch with us for further assistance. Specifically, we'd love to hear if you have other solutions for this issue.