When Disk Utility opens, select the drive that is to be partitioned and formatted from the left-side panel.In Utilities, select and open Disk Utility.From the drop-down menu, click on Utilities. Once the drive appears on the desktop, click on Go on the top tool bar.Begin by connecting the WD drive to the Mac computer.For instructions on how to do this, please see the instructions below: One of the easiest ways to format a drive to use ExFAT is by using macOS's built-in Disk Utility. Click on Done.ĮxFAT in macOS 10.10 (Yosemite) and earlier When finished, the drive will be formatted and repartitioned successfully.If additional assistance is required, please Contact Us. If the error message persists, restarting the computer may resolve the issue. Determine what program is accessing the drive and shut it down before trying to format the drive again. If an error message is received stating that the drive is unable to be unmounted, this means that there is a program or service currently reading or writing data on the drive. Disk Utility will begin the formatting and repartitioning process.Confirm that the name of the drive is correct in the Partition area, and update it if necessary.This is the format that the drive will be formatted to. Click next to Format to display a drop-down menu, and select exFAT. Click on Partition on the top menu of the Disk Utility window.When the Erasing process is completed, click on Done.Click Erase to begin the format process.All Intel-based macOS computers and drives larger than 2 Terabytes should use the GUID Partition Map. It is best to use Master Boot Record only for MS DOS format. Only legacy macOS systems, using non-Intel CPU's, will utilize the Apple Partition Map. Select the Scheme (Partition Table Scheme) from the drop-down menu.For this article, we chose exFAT, see image below. Select the Format (file system) from the drop-down menu.Assign the name that will be given to the drive. The Erase dialog window will now appear.After selecting the appropriate drive, additional option buttons will become available on the top part of the Disk Utility window.In the example below, the one to be selected would be WD Elements SE. It is usually directly above the name of the drive. Choose the drive listing that is farthest to the left (Not indented) for the drive to be formatted. Typically there are two listings for each drive unless more than one partition exists on a particular drive. From the left-side pane, choose the drive that is to be re-formatted. From the Applications folder, open Utilities, and lastly double-click on Disk Utility. Choose Applications from the left-side panel. Double left-click on the Mac HD, the internal Mac hard drive visible on the top-right corner of the desktop screen.Connect the WD drive to the Mac computer.For instructions on how to do this, please see the instructions below: Erase There are two easy ways to format a drive to use ExFAT is by using macOS's built-in Disk Utility using Erase (Step 4) or Partition (Step 7). IMPORTANT: For SanDisk Professional drives, please Click Here for InstructionsĮxFAT in macOS 10.11 (El Capitan) and above This could quickly damage the drive's partition and corrupt the data on the drive. Never attempt to connect any external drive to multiple computers at the same time. Western Digital recommends that when formatting a drive that it be the only drive present on the system to limit occurences of accidental data loss. Once the process begins, ALL THE DATA ON THE DRIVE WILL BE LOST! This process is Data Destructive and cannot be undone. The instructions in the article below are designed to help repartition and format a hard drive. The easiest way to format the drive to FAT32 or ExFAT is by using macOS's built-in Disk Utility for FAT32, or both macOS and Windows' built-in tools, Disk Utility or Disk Management respectively for exFAT. For more information about what these limitations are please see Answer ID 20778: FAT32 File System and Partition Size Limits for Windows & macOS. This is a file system limitation that affects both macOS's and Window's, and the only workaround is to format the drive to exFAT. FAT32 has several limitations, including a 4 GB per-file limit. Most WD Drives come formatted in the NTFS (Windows) or HFS+ (macOS) format.įor a hard drive to be able to be read from and written to on both a Windows and macOS computer, it must be formatted to ExFAT or FAT32 file format. This is useful if a drive is being used under both Operating System (OS) to move files between the two environments. Answer ID 50277: Format an External Drive as exFat using Windows for use on Windows and macOS Guided AssistĪnswer ID 50276: Format an External Drive as exFat using macOS for use on macOS and Windows Guided AssistĪ Western Digital external hard drive can be used on both Windows and macOS.
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