

I have a WD my passport 2.5' usb3 hdd that was formatted as NTFS, just. As you have backed up the photos on the windows machine, you should try to use disk utility to fix your drive. To format a Western Digital My Passport external hard drive in ex-FAT or FAT32 format, you can bank on built-in applications of Mac & PC. In the next 5 minutes read, you will master yourself in formatting a WD My Passport safely and in a manner best suited for sharing your digital files between a macOS and Windows OS.

So you can buy so called 'PC' version and just reformat it as HFS/APFS and use with time machine. Thankfully, FAT32 and ex-FAT formats have survived to date, and these are the file systems to make your WD My Passport work with a Mac and a Windows PC simultaneously. There shouldn't be any difference except price for a 'For Apple' tag.
#USE MY PASSPORT WD FOR BOTH MAC AND PC HOW TO#
Now you can take it to either Mac or PC to start writing to it. They only sell a 'Mac' version so they can charge people who don't know how to format a disk.
#USE MY PASSPORT WD FOR BOTH MAC AND PC MAC OS#
If you right click on the drive (in Mac OS X) then click ‘Get info’ the "Sharing & Permissions’ caption states Under Format, choose MS-DOS (FAT), then hit Apply to format the drive.Īfter that the Passport drive is formatted and it is able to read and write from Mac and PC. Under Options, choose Master Boot Record and hit OK, Western Digital My Passport External Portable Hard Drive For Mac, 5TB, WDBA2F00.4.6. of my lifetime collected data & thus have over 15 TB of external harddisks in my arsenal with a dominant share of Western digital disks( both passport & elements ) & few others like Transcend, Samsung SSD & a seagate ( old usb 2.0 ). Western Digital My Passport 2TB Portable External Hard Drive. Select Partition, Under Volume Scheme choose 1 partition, WD Elements 4TB Portable External Hard Drive, USB 3.0, Compatible with PC, Mac, PS4 and Xbox - (WDBHDW0040BBK-EESN). Drive which was FAT formatted so that I could use it on my Windows PC and my MacBook. You must back up all of the data to either your PC or MAC internal hard disk drive.įormatting the drive will erase all data.Īfter you have done backing up, connect the Passport drive to your Mac computer. Your USB drive on macOS has a working partition map that makes the. If you allow Time Machine to configure the drive, all of your data will not be read or write from PC. Meaning if you try to copy a file size bigger than 4GB it will give you an error or not work. You can not use Time machine with the drive.

The down side: the files size is limited to less than 4GB each.The up side: you can read and write to it from Mac and PC.Then your Western Digital external hard drive is ready to use on your Mac and on your Windows PC. Then you quickly follow up by formatting to ExFAT. First to format your WD Elements external drive to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) file system. If you are really, really want to do that you need to read these first: Connect up your WD Elements drive to your Mac.
