WD E Portable hard drive no longer working on my tv since formatting with my Macbook

WD External Drives WD Portable Drives
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HELP

Ok, so I have had my hard drive for about a year, I have never had issues with it working on my tv (sony).

I just recently bought a MACBook Pro and have plugged my hard drive into it and reformatted the hard drive (following instructions on the WD website and formatting to extended journaled etc), HOWEVER, I put all the same movies back on it and plugged it into my TV and my tv all of a sudden “cannot recognise usb drive”… it is seriously driving me INSANE. I want it back to how it was formatted when I bought it as now I can’t watch movies and that’s the whole reason why I bought the hard drive and was working perfectly fine before. I’ve tried changing to the other format options in my disk utility and my TV won’t recognise any of them.

Im not tech savvy AT ALL so please don’t laugh at me if it is only a simple solution to fix hahaha.

Can someone PLEASE tell me how to get my hard drive back to factory format when I bought it???

Thank you very much in advance.

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It was probably formatted as NTFS out of the box.

If you have access to a Windows PC, reformat it there.

1 Like
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Correct. Unless the unit is a Mac-specific WD Passport then the original file system was NTFS.

However, once it’s formatted back to NTFS in a Windows-based computer you will no longer be able to use it with your Mac since the file system is not compatible beyond read access.

You can try exFAT as a middle ground between Windows and Mac if your TV supports it. Check your documentation.

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People who jump from PC to Mac without knowing what they are getting into need to get a little “tech savvy” beforehand and understand the BIG differences between the two platforms! It’s never too late to learn, so start Googling.