Hello, I bought two WD Elements 4TB drives and wished to format them as HFS+ for Macintosh. I’m currently running Mac OS High Sierra 10.13.6, and will be moving to Mojavi in a couple of weeks. Please be advised that Apple Disk Utility 17.0.3 on Apple High Sierra fails to recognize the drives. Fortunately I had an old MacBook running Snow Leopard lying around. I was able to successfully format the two drives by using Apple Disk Utility version 11.5.2 running on the old laptop. So in case any of you Mac users come here looking for a big save, see if you can hunt down an older version of Disk Util and you will be good to go with your new Elements drive.
~Tim
Hi Crab,
Maybe you should try contacting WD’s Technical Support about this.
To Contact WD for Technical Support
https://support.wdc.com/support/case.aspx?lang=en
The link below will allow you to call support.
Hi Brandon, WD must know about the problem, I doubt if my computer is unique to the rest of them. The drives are on-line now and very responsive. It was just a little unnerving that I couldn’t format them, especially since I bought two of the babies. I posted a workaround in my ticket, hopefully it’s still there to help others.
Thanks for the followup Brandon.
Phone: (951) 572-2575
Alt phone: (951) 313-8448
Email: support@colorlabelsolutions.com
Web: www.colorlabelsolutions.com
**Tim Semic **Technical Support Manager
Hi, when you reformatted on your mac and it prompts you to “erase”, did it erase anything on your computer itself?
Hello Lexy, The short answer is no.
When you use Apple’s Disk Utility.app to format a drive, you select the drive that you want to perform some action on. If you have multiple drives available, you would have to deal with them one at a time. The only time multiple drives would ever be involved is if you were setting up a RAID set. I think that would be difficult to accidentally do, and is not a typical setup.
Also, Disk Utility will not allow you to erase the drive that you are booted off of, such as your internal drive. Lastly, Disk Utility wouldn’t be able to delete “some” files off of your drive, it’s an all or none situation. It either erases the whole drive or none of the drive.
If you are missing files I recommend that you download EasyFind. It is a great find file application and has a cute icon too. I love EasyFind and have relied upon it for more than twenty years.
