Using WD 4 TB My Passport for both Mac and PC

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

I have just purchased a WD My Passport external 4 TB drive and wish to use it on both my PC as well as my iMac. I read that I needed to re-format the HD drive which I did but now neither the PC nor the Mac even sees the HD.

How do I fix this and then how do I ensure that I can use the WD My Passport on both the Mac and the PC

2

Well, what did you do to format it? And what options did you use?

Reformatting with a GPT partition table and exFAT formatting is all you need to do.

3

Thank you for your response Tony.

I called up the “properties” of the My Passport HD and simply re-formatted the WD Hard Drive to the exFAT format using my PC as I was led to believe was needed. After doing that neither the PC nor the iMac even sees the external HD at all.

I did not do anything else.

Regards,

Delwin

4

Download and install WD Utilities to format your drive as ExFat

5

There are two File Systems that can be both supported by Mac and PC Operating System: FAT32 and exFAT.

FAT32 is more compatible. Besides Windows and Mac, it can also compatible with various devices like PS3, PS4, Xbox One, etc. However, you cannot store large files over than 4GB on FAT32 formatted USB drive and the volume has 2TB restriction. As for exFAT, it is less compatible. But it breaks the limitation of 4GB in File size and 2 TB in volume size.

Therefore, if you want to use your USB drive with more devices, you can choose FAT32. If you need to store large file over 4GB, choose exFAT.
To finish such formatting task, you can directly right click the WD hard drive in Windows File Explore, choose “Format”, or open Disk Management to format the hard drive. If you fail, you can choose free disk formatting software to do that.

6

Thank you for your response Monicabang - much appreciated.

My problems is that I cannot even see the WD Hard Drive on the Mac “Finder” nor on the PC’s “File Explorer” The Hard Drive simply disappeared from both after I had re-formatted it to exFAT using the PC to do this having gone into the “Properties” of the WD Hard Drive.

How do I get back to be able to see the HD?

Regards,

Delwin

7

On the PC:

  • Right-click the “This PC” icon (or whatever it’s called on your system), or search for “computer management” app in the search bar.
  • Select Storage/Disk Management.
  • The disk should show up in the bottom pane.
  • Select your disk, and make sure it’s the correct one! You don’t want to format the wrong disk.
  • Right-click on the right-hand pane for your disk to get the Format option. You may need to right-click on the left-hand pane to initialize it first, depending on its status.