Can I Use WD Hard Drive on Mac and PC. The WD Hard Drive Format Utility can be used to unlock and lock the drive or hide your sensitive information from an unknown person. Method 2: format WD Elements for Mac with a free format tool. WD Elements Time Machine, Turn ON Your Backup. Format WD Elements for Mac and PC, Have your Drive for Both. To format your external drive hard drive in Windows to use on Mac and PC platforms, first plug-in your drive with a Windows machine. Select a format from the "Format" drop-down menu beneath the "Name" text field, for example, "Mac OS X Extended (Journaled)" or "MSDOS (Fat)." I had to format it for my Mac. I wanted to transfer these mp3s to a friends wd drive that she has given me, but she has a PC, I have tried to open my drive on my sons pc but being mac formatted it doesnt mount on the desktop whereas the friends new … c. Use a Mac with an older release of Mac OS to format your WD Passport drive. Note that this will impose a maximum file size limit on the files that can be stored on the drive. To be readable and writable on both, you need to format it in either FAT32 or exFAT format - see this article for some details. iLuke - Feb 12, 2010 at 12:46 AM mIKE - Mar 26, 2010 at 12:44 AM. I assume that meant the WD Element. Learn detailed steps below: When trying to set up the Elements on my MacBook Pro, it wouldn’t erase, so I tried to format anyway for ExFAT. macOS supports a handful of common file systems - HFS+, FAT32, and exFAT, with read-only support for NTFS. Before you get the answer, you must figure out what kind of file system can work well on both the macOS and the Windows system. Use a Windows PC to format your WD My Passport drive first to ExFAT. d. Download the WD Discovery software for Mac from the Western Digital … Name the WD external hard drive in the "Name" text field that appears beneath the "Erase" tab. These will format the drive in OS X's HFS+ filetype so it will be compatible with Time Machine. Step 6 Once formatting completes, you can then use your drive in Mac as a usual hard drive. How to use WD Elements HD with Both PC & MAC [Closed] Report. Hello, I bought a 320GB WD elements, I was just wondering how to I use it with Both mac & PC. Got a message that the format attempt failed due to not enough space on the device. Then try again on the Mac. 7. But if it referred to the Mac, either is impossible, because both have well over 50% free space. A Mac can also read an NTFS-formatted drive natively, but can’t write to it. Then tried to format on my PC… 1 - purchase a second hard drive, format the new hard drive in HFS+, transfer the files from the NTFS drive into the new HFS+ external, and then format the old NTFS drive to HFS+, ExFAT, or FAT32. 6. And throw up issues when you format the external hard drive on a Windows PC and then you use on your Mac. b. If your My Passport drive shows up in the list go ahead and format. Click Erase and OS X will format the drive. Step 5 Thereafter, click on the “Erase” button and let the system erase everything on the drive and reformat WD elements for Mac by exFAT or FAT32 format. Format USB Drive in Windows. It has around 300 gb of lectures in mp3. AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard as a comprehensive partition manager can assist you in formatting WD Elements for Mac and it is free of Command Prompt’s limitation. The method you’ll learn uses your Mac to format your WD passport for Mac and Windows. Western Digital Hard Drive Format Utility Virus. The below steps for formatting external drive is for Windows 10 and also works the same with an old version of Windows. The Western Digital Hard Disk Drive is a storage device where you can save large data. I recommend doing it this way, as Macs can be choosy about what formats their hard drives. 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