
- Format wd external hard drive for mac and windows how to#
- Format wd external hard drive for mac and windows for mac#
- Format wd external hard drive for mac and windows mac os#
- Format wd external hard drive for mac and windows pro#
- Format wd external hard drive for mac and windows software#
Your Windows personal computer can’t see that partition.
Format wd external hard drive for mac and windows mac os#
Partition that you want your Mac to use for backup you format as Mac OS Extended One partition for your Time Machine back up of your Mac. And you use each piece for different things. Think of partitions as slicing your Elements external storage into different size pieces. You would do this by creating partitions on your hard drive.
Format wd external hard drive for mac and windows for mac#
What If You Want A Separate Area On Your WD Elements For Mac And PC? You plug back into your Mac your Mac can see and use those files. Work on documents on the drive and put docs from your PC onto the drive. Western Digital Elements drive into your PC. Copy files from your Mac onto your Elements drive. You’ll find the name you gave it under its drive icon.Įntire WD Elements external hard drive is in a format both computers can use.Ĭreate folders. Your WD external hard drive shows up on your Mac’s desktop. And ready for you to use on your Mac and your Windows platform. Click toĬlick on Erase on the bottom right hand corner of the pop up window.Īnd in a few minutes your WD Elements drive is ExFAT formatted. Scheme as GUID Partition Map as you did before. You select the file system format of ExFAT. Now Format Your WD Elements Drive As ExFAT Your drive now changes from NTFS to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) file system. Then click on Erase on the bottom right of the pop up window.ĭisk Utility now takes a few minutes to format your WD external drive. Next pick GUID Partition Map for the scheme. You open up the up down arrows to expand the list of available file system formats. The red arrow on the picture shows you where to click. You format your Elements drive to Mac OS Extended Journaled file system. You’ll format your external hard disk twice. One that’ll help you know exactly what you’re using your Elements WD hard drive for. Put in a name for your Elements shared external hdd.Ĭhoose a name that’s easy for you to remember. Your WD Element drive comes with a USB cable that has a type A connector that plugs into your Mac.ĥ. You’ll want to make sure you’ve enough power for your drive. And you’re half way through formatting your Western Digital Elements drive. You won’t want your Mac’s battery to fail. Why?īecause the USB cable powers your Elements drive.
Format wd external hard drive for mac and windows pro#
You may want to think about connecting your MacBook Pro or Air to external power. You’ll need your Mac powered on and you logged in. And this way you’ll get a shared drive that works reliably. Mac’s are choosy about the formatting of their external drives.
Format wd external hard drive for mac and windows how to#

Identify and click the drive that you would like to format. Once the application is open, you would be able to see a list of available drives on the left side of the window. If you need to format your external hard drive, do not worry as you can do it as easy as the following steps:Īfter you have connected your external hard drive on you Mac, launch the "Disk Utility" application which can be found under "Applications". How to Format an External Hard Drive on Windows This article will teach you how to format external hard drive for Mac and PC. If there are errors or system failure where the external hard drives are not accessible, this would prompt for the action of formatting as well.

A lot of people would format their hard drives as soon as it is infected to avoid more damage. More often than not, a lot of external hard drives are impacted by incurable virus infection. If you purchase an external hard drive as an addition to expand the storage space of your computer, most likely you would need to format it. There are various reasons why you might need to format external hard drives. Recover Particular External Hard DriveĮxternal hard drives are handy tools in storing files, data and documents.

Format wd external hard drive for mac and windows software#
