Unable to format a 4TB WD Passport to exFAT or FAT32

Hello All,

I’m having this issue and seeking your advice to resolve it.

I recently bought a 4TB WD My Passport.
I used my Macbook Pro that runs on OS X El Captain Version 10.11.6 to format the portable hard drive.

I followed the instructions on

to format to exFat.

It’s unsuccessful. The pop-up screen said: Erase process has failed. The disk is too large to be supported by the given partition scheme.
I restarted my macbook and did the steps again, but it’s still unsuccessful.

I followed the instructions from the same webpage above to format to FAT32, but it’s also unsuccessful. I restarted my MacBook and repeated the steps, it was still unsuccessful.

I wonder why the formatting process failed.
Any suggestions to fix this issue will be appreciated.

With thanks,
Mei

See if this helps:

Hi Tony,

Thanks for the info.
I do not understand what it means by using command line (terminal).

When I clicked on Disk Utility > WD My Passport >

How to do the next step below? Where to find #, 0 and 1 boxes to type in this information?

First find the disk: diskutil list
e.g
/dev/disk3 (external, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *X TB disk4
1: Microsoft Basic Data easystore X TB disk4s1

With thanks,
Mei