For Windows computers, go to the Start menu and select Windows Update. Disk Drive Format Your My Passport for Mac drive is formatted as a single HSF+J partition for compatibility with Mac OS X operating systems. If you want to use the drive with a Windows computer, see Reformatting the Drive and Troubleshooting.
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How to Format WD My Passport Portable Hard Drive on Mac? How to Format WD My Passport Portable Hard Drive on Mac?by Shirly Chen, 2017-02-14'Hi, I have a 2TB WD My Passport portable hard drive and a MacBook Pro. I am looking for a solution to format the WD My Passport portable hard drive on my MacBook Pro. Do you know how to do that?'
– JasonDo you know how to format WD My Passport portable hard drive on Mac? If you don’t have any ideas, you can find a reliable solution in this article. Formatting is a good method to help you regain the full storage of your WD My Passport portable hard drive. It is also a good way to remove virus-infected files completely. And with special tool, you even can permanently destroy all the data on your WD My Passport portable hard drive after formatting. TWO easy methods to format WD My Passport portable hard drive on MacOf course, there are more than two methods that can help you format a WD My Passport portable hard drive under Mac OS. However, all of the solutions can be divided into two types: format, format & wipe.
The difference is if the formatted data can be recovered by data recovery software. Now, I will show you the two methods to format WD My Passport portable hard drive on Mac. Method 1: format WD My Passport portable hard drive on Mac with disk utility.Disk utility is a Mac application, you can run it on your Mac. It will list all the hard drives and devices on your Mac computer. You just need to select the WD My Passport portable hard drive and erase it. Disk utility will erase the data and format your WD My Passport portable hard drive. Some other applications also can help you quick format your WD My Passport portable hard drive on Mac., for example, can help you quickly format your WD My Passport portable hard drive on Mac.Please note that this type of formatting can permanently destroy your data.
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The formatted data still stored on the unused disk space of WD My Passport portable hard drive and can be recovered by or manual data recovery service. Method 2: format WD My Passport portable hard drive on Mac with Super Eraser for Mac.You may know to how to.
So it is not safe to sell or donate your device if you just quick format it. It is strongly recommended to destroy the sensitive data before you sell, donate, give away or lend your WD My Passport portable hard drive to other people. Now, you need special Mac data erasure tool – to help you format WD My Passport portable hard drive on Mac and completely destroy the formatted data, beyond the scope of data recovery. Step 1: Choose mode Wipe Hard Drive.Run on your Mac. It will automatically recognize your WD My Passport portable hard drive. Then click to choose Wipe Hard Drive mode to format/wipe the WD My Passport portable hard drive on your Mac.Step 2: Format and wipe WD My Passport portable hard drive.Click on Wipe Now button to format and wipe WD My Passport portable hard drive.
All the data on the WD My Passport portable hard drive will be permanently erased. (If the WD My Passport portable hard drive is a NTFS drive, just click.)Once the process gets finished, the WD My Passport portable hard drive is formatted and all data on the WD My Passport portable hard drive is erased.When you run to format your WD My Passport portable hard drive for Mac, it will format the hard drive at first. Then it will shred and wipe all the formatted data. And last, it will overwrite the unused disk space with zero bites. So once your WD My Passport portable hard drive is formatted by Super Eraser for Mac, all the existing data and history data on the device will be permanently lost, can’t be recovered by any method.
Quick Navigation:.As we know, external hard drives are widely used to backup data or interchange files among different computers. Well, is there an external hard drive that could be shared between Mac and Windows PC? Of course, there is. Actually, most external hard disks could be compatible with Mac and PC as long as you format them correctly.
Why Need to Format External Hard Drive for Mac and PCTo put it simply, if you want to share external hard drive between Mac and PC, you need to format an external hard drive for Mac and PC.Currently, hard drives for Windows PC are always formatted with NTFS, while hard disks for Mac are formatted with HFS+. However, when we connect a NTFS formatted disk to Mac, Mac OS X doesn't allow us to write files to the drive neither edit files, though it can read a NTFS drive. Similarly, Windows OS will ask us to format the HFS+ formatted drive when we connecting such a disk, let along edit files saved on HFS+ formatted hard disks unless we resort to third party programs.But luckily, there are well supported by both Mac and Windows PC, and they are FAT32 (it might be called MS-DOS on Mac) and exFAT. As long as we format the external hard drive to one of these 2 file systems, it can be shared between Mac and Windows.Further ReadingBoth FAT32 and exFAT have advantages and disadvantages.FAT32: FAT32 works with all versions of Windows, Mac OS, Linux, game consoles, etc.However, single files on a FAT32 drive can't be larger than 4GB.
If your external drive saves files larger than 4GB or you plan to save larger files to this drive, converting to FAT32 is not recommended.In addition, a FAT32 partition must be not more than 32GB if you create it in Windows Disk Management. Of course, there is that can help create a FAT32 volume up to 2TB, which also functions correctly.exFAT: exFAT has very large file size and partition size limits, which means it's a good idea to format your external hard drive to exFAT.Nevertheless, a lot of users complained that exFAT is slow, and they highly suggest using FAT32 if you can avoid file size constraints. Three Options for Accessing NTFS Drives on Mac Paid Third-Party DriversSome paid third-party NTFS drivers for Mac can be used to access NTFS drives on Mac. They work well and they have better performance than the free solutions which will be mentioned in the following part. Paragon NTFS for Mac is such a driver.Besides, you can also use the paid third-party file system converters to convert NTFS to FAT32 or exFAT which are compatible with both Mac and PC. MiniTool Partition Wizard is one representative. Free Third-Party DriversFUSE for macOS is a free and open-source NTFS driver that can enable write support.
But, this solution is slower relatively. And the automatically mounting NTFS partitions in read-write mode can be a security risk for your Mac computer.
Apple’s Experimental NTFS-Write SupportThe Mac OS has an experimental support for writing to NTFS drives. Usually, it is disabled by default and needs some messing around in the Mac terminal to enable it.It doesn’t work properly all the time and could lead to potential issues with your NTFS file system. For example, it had corrupted data before. Thus, we don’t suggest using this tool and we believe it is disabled by this reason.Here, we recommend using the paid third-party tools since they are easy-to-use and can do good work for you.Then, we will introduce these three options for you in the following content.The Best Paid Third-Party Driver: Paragon NTFS for MacParagon NTFS for Mac can write, edit, delete, copy, or move files on NTFS volumes from your Mac computer. It offers a 10-day free trial. If you want to use it all the time, you need to pay for it.With it, you don’t have to fiddle with terminal commands to mount partitions manually.
Additionally, it can mount partitions automatically and safely. More importantly, it can code with the potential corruption. If you purchase a Seagate drive, you can even get a free download of Paragon NTFS for Mac.All in all, it does its works well and gives you good user’s experience.
The Best Free Third-Party Drivers: FUSE for macOSFUSE for macOS is a free solution to access NTFS on Mac. But it is less secure.If you want to make automatically mount NTFS partitions in read-write mode on Mac, you need to temporarily disable the System Integrity Protection and replace one of Apple’s built-in tools with a binary that is more vulnerable to attack. Thus, your Mac is in danger when using this driver.However, you can use it to manually mount NTFS partitions in read-write mode if you never mind using the Terminal. This will be safer, but you need to do more work. You can go to google the steps and see how complex they are. Apple’s Experimental NTFS-Writing Support: Don’t Do This, SeriouslyAlthough we mentioned this method in our article, we still don’t recommend it because it is the least tested.
It is just for educational purposes, and it is available on Mac OS 10.12 Sierra. Perhaps, it will be unstable forever.How to Quickly Format External Hard Drive for Mac and PC without Losing DataAnother way to access NTFS drive on Mac is to convert the NTFS/HFS+ to FAT/exFAT. Then, the drive can be used on both Mac and PC.There should be some important data on the drive. To keep it safe, you can choose this best NTFS/HFS+ to FAT/exFAT converter: MiniTool Partition Wizard. How to Convert NTFS to FAT32 or exFAT Without Data LossTo format hard drive for Mac and Windows without data loss, we suggest using MiniTool Partition Wizard and its ' Convert NTFS to FATS32' function. If you are a personal user, you can try its Professional Edition.Step 1: Run MiniTool Partition WizardDownload this software to your computer. Then, you can open the software and input the license key to the pop-out window to get its Professional Edition.Step 2: Convert NTFS to FAT32 with This SoftwareAfter running the program successfully, we can see its main interface as follows:Here, please select the NTFS partition of external hard drive and choose ' Convert NTFS to FAT' feature from the left action pane.
If there is more than one NTFS partition, convert all of them one by one.At last, click ' Apply' button to make the change executed.When MiniTool Partition Wizard shows it applies the change successfully, the original NTFS will finally become a FAT32 partition.By this way, you can easily format an external hard drive for Mac and PC without losing any data. Then, you can share external hard drive between Mac and PCYou Can Convert NTFS to exFAT in 3 StepsHowever, if you want to convert NTFS to exFAT to make external hard drive compatible with Mac and PC, 3 steps are required.Step 1: Transfer Data out from External Hard DriveYou can choose to copy and paste those files to other external devices or internal hard disk of Windows, but it will cost much time. Instead, you can use to create a copy for your external drive, which is faster.If there is only one NTFS partition on external hard drive, refer to the tutorial to get instructions. However, if there is more than one NTFS partition, view to get specific operations.Step 2: Create exFAT Partition with MiniTool Partition WizardThe Free Edition of this software also enables you to do this job.Firstly, you need to delete the partition by using this software. Just open the software to enter its main interface. Then, choose the target partition and click ' Delete Partition' from the left action pane.
After that, you should click ' Apply' to keep this change.Secondly, the target partition will become unallocated. Here, you need to choose that partition and click on ' Create Partition' from the left action pane.Thirdly, you will see a pop-out window. Here, you can choose ' exFAT' from the ' File System' setting option. At the same time, you can also set some other parameters for this partition, including ' Partition Label', ' Drive Letter', ' Size And Location'. After that, please click on ' OK'.Fourthly, you will go back to the main interface. Then, please click on ' Apply' to save these changes.Finally, an exFAT partition will be created on your external hard disk so that it could be shared between Mac and Windows PCStep 3: Transfer Data back to External DriveIf you want to share files that you have backed up between Mac and PC, now please transfer these files back to external hard drive.
How to Convert HFS+ to FAT32 or exFAT without Losing DataBesides, you can format an external hard drive for Mac and Windows by converting HFS+ to FAT32 or exFAT without losing any data.Step 1: Backup Data in HFS+ Partition on MacJust transfer all useful files out from the external hard drive to other devices on Mac. Of course, if you have a backup already, ignore this step.Step 2: Create a FAT32 or exFAT Partition on Windows PCSome people may ask why create such partitions on Windows rather than Mac. Note: when you connect an external hard drive which is formatted with HFS+ with computer, Windows may ask you to format the drive. Please choose Cancel.Please download and install this program on your Windows computer to format an external hard drive for Mac and PC.Firstly, open the software to enter its main interface as follows. Here, please select the NTFS partition or HFS+ partition of external hard drive, and click ' Delete Partition' feature from the left action pane. If there are multiple partitions on the external disk, please select the disk and click ' Delete All Partitions' feature instead. After that, an unallocated space will be released.Secondly, you can create one or more FAT32 partitions in unallocated space.
Select the unallocated space and choose 'Create Partition' feature from the left side.Then, you should choose ' FAT32' from the ' File System' option in the pop-out window. Meanwhile, you can set properties for this new partition and click ' OK' to go back to the main window of Partition Wizard.At last, click ' Apply' button to make all changes performed.Solution 2: Format External Hard Drive Windows 7/8/10 to exFATFirstly, please delete the NTFS or HFS+ partition in either MiniTool Partition Wizard or Windows Disk Management to release unallocated space.
Then, you can create an exFAT partition with MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition by following steps introduced in the section Step 2: Create exFAT Partition with MiniTool Partition Wizard.Once a FAT32 or exFAT partition is created on your external hard drive, you can share it on both Mac and Windows PC.Solution 3: Create One HFS+ Partition for Mac and One NTFS Partition for WindowsAlternatively, you can create 2 partitions on the external hard drive: one is for Mac, and the other is for Windows. As to size for each partition, it depends on your own demands.
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