You can choose a macOS-supported file system, including FAT32, exFAT, Mac OS Extended, and APFS.īesides, you may want to format WD My Passport for Mac to create a bootable installer for macOS, fix corrupted external hard drive on Mac, free up disk space, etc., then you can follow the steps below. Then reformatting WD My Passport for Mac is a quick resort to making the drive compatible with macOS. However, macOS gives limited support for NTFS format, you can read NTFS on Mac, but can't write to NTFS-formatted WD My Passport on Mac, which is inconvenient for whom need to move to back and forward between Mac and Windows systems. That is to say, most WD My Passport external hard drives come with the NTFS, the default file system. Given that Windows is still the most widely used operating system, some popular hard drive manufacturers such as Western Digital format the drives with NTFS(New Technology File System, a file system developed by Microsoft and applied to Windows operating system) when shipping out. And the last one is the main and most common reason causing the WD My Passport external hard drive unusable on Mac. Such a problem may be caused by read-only permission, drive corruption or the incompatibility of the file system between the external drive and the Mac operating system. Step 1: Connect the USB cable to your My Passport and to your Windows PC Step 2: Open My Passport and install WD Discovery from the drive Step 3: Activate WD.

Some Mac users have complained that the WD My Passport is read-only on Mac, and they can't transfer files to WD My Passport from Mac. The instructions say to click Partition but that action is greyed out. The size field is greyed out and the value shows as 1,000GB. When I select the drive and click Partition, it displays the name, the format is ExFAT and there is a size field. Why you need to format WD My Passport for Mac After Erasing My Passport drive, the instructions are to Partition the drive. How to use WD My Passport on Mac without formatting Why you need to format WD My Passport for Mac And sometimes, you may need to format WD My Passport for Mac, and this post is a detailed tutorial. Computer users use external hard drives such as the popular WD My Passport to expand disk space, transfer files between devices, back up important files, boot from the drive when MacBook won't turn on, etc.

How to reformat my passport