- Wd External Hard Drive Driver For Mac
- Wd External Hard Drive Software For Mac
- Wd External Hard Drive Troubleshooting
- Wd External Drive Not Working
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- In this guide to the best external hard drives for Macs, we look at the top devices for plugging in and expanding the storage space of your Mac or MacBook. While there's a lot to love about Macs.
- Solution 4: Repair WD external hard drive not readable with Disk Utility. However, if none of those options has worked and your WD external drive still is not readable by your Mac, then this disk could have some disk errors that need to be repaired. Fortunately, the Mac built-in disk repair tool, Disk Utility can help you out. Here are the steps.
So, you just bought an external hard drive or a portable SSD and wanted to use it on your Mac. But somehow, macOS doesn’t allow you to write data to the drive.
That’s all because it’s been initialized with Windows NT File System (NTFS), which is primarily for PCs. Apple Mac machines support a different file system.
In this post, I’m going to show you how to format your external drive for a Mac compatible file system i.e. Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Just follow this easy step-by-step guide and you’re all set.
Important note: If you have useful files stored on the external drive, be sure to copy or transfer them to another safe place prior to formatting. The operation will erase all data and your files will be gone for good. You could use a recovery program like Data Rescue to retrieve them, but the odds of recovery vary.
Pro tip: If your external drive has a large volume, like mine – a 2TB Seagate Expansion. I highly recommend you also create multiple partitions. I’ll also show you how to do that below.
Most External Hard Drives Are Initiated with NTFS
During the last several years, I’ve used several removable drives, including a 500GB WD My Passport, 32GB Lexar flash drive, and a few others.
Three weeks ago, I bought a brand new 2TB Seagate Expansion to backup my MacBook Pro before I updated to the latest macOS, 10.13 High Sierra (also see those High Sierra issues I encountered).
When I connected the Seagate to my Mac, the drive icon showed up like this.
When I opened it, the default content was all there. Since I wanted to use it on Mac, I clicked the blue logo with the text “Start_Here-Mac”.
It brought me to a webpage on Seagate’s site, where it clearly indicated the drive was initially set up to work with a Windows PC. If I wanted to use it with Mac OS or Time Machine backup (which is my intent), I’ll need to format the drive for my Mac.
I then right-clicked the external drive icon on Mac desktop > Get Info. It showed this format:
Format: Windows NT File System (NTFS)
What is NTFS? I’m not going to explain here; you can read more on Wikipedia. The problem is that on macOS, you can’t work with files saved on an NTFS drive unless you use a paid app Paragon NTFS for Mac.
How to Format an External Drive to Work with Mac (from NTFS to Mac OS Extended)?
Note: The tutorial and screenshots below are based on macOS Sierra 10.12.5. They might be different if your Mac has a different version.
Step 1: Open Disk Utility.
The quickest way to do this is a simple Spotlight search (click the search icon on the upper right corner), or go to Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility.
Step 2: Highlight your external drive and click “Erase”.
Make sure your drive is connected. It should show up on the left panel under “External”. Select that disk and click the “Erase” button, the one highlighted in red in the screenshot below.
Step 3: Select “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” in Format.
A new window will pop up asking which file system you’d like to format the external drive to. By default, it’s the Windows NT File System (NTFS). Select the one shown below.
Pro tip: If you want to use the external drive for both Mac and PC, you can also select “ExFAT”. https://aswuyf.weebly.com/snapseed-for-mac.html. Learn more about the differences between these file systems from this thread.
By the way, you can also rename your external drive.
Step 4: Wait until the erasing process is complete.
For me, it took less than a minute to format my 2TB Seagate Expansion.
You can also check to see if the format was successful. Right-click on the icon for your external drive on Mac desktop, then select “Get Info”. Under “Format”, you should see text like this:
Congratulations! Now your external drive has been formatted to be fully compatible with Apple MacOS, and you can edit, read, and write files to it as you want.
How to Partition an External Hard Drive on Mac
If you want to create multiple partitions on your external hard drive (in fact, you should for better file organization), here’s a step-by-step guide:
Step 1: Highlight your drive and click “Partition” in Disk Utility.
Open the Disk Utility app and highlight your external hard drive. Make sure you select the disk icon right under “External”. If you select the one below it, the Partition option will be greyed out and become unclickable.
Step 2: Add partitions and allocate volume for each one.
After clicking “Partition”, you’ll see this window. Located on the left is a big blue circle with the name of your external drive together with its volume size. What you need to do next is click the add “+” button to increase the number of partitions on your external disk. Then allocate the desired volume to each partition. You can do that by clicking the small white circle and dragging it around.
After that, you can rename each partition and define a file system for it.
Step 3: Confirm your operation.
Once you hit “Apply”, a new window pops up asking for your confirmation. Take a few seconds to read the text description to make sure it reflects what you intend to do, then click the “Partition” button to continue.
Step 4: Wait until it says “Operation successful.”
To check whether the operation is really successful, go to your Mac desktop. You should see multiple disk icons show up. I chose to create two partitions on my Seagate Expansion — one for backup, the other for personal use. You can find more info in this post: How to Backup Mac to an External Hard Drive.
That wraps up this tutorial article. I hope you find it helpful. As always, let me know if you have any issues during the formatting or partitioning process.
Lot of Mac OS X users reported this issue in Apple support communities. External hard drive showing up in Disk utility not in Devices. This problem also happened after OS X Yosemite update.
Solution 1:-
Go to Settings -> Finder Preferences . Under the General tab, select External drive in “Show these items on the desktop”.
Solution 1:-
Go to Settings -> Finder Preferences . Under the General tab, select External drive in “Show these items on the desktop”.
Solution 2 :-
Go to Disk utility and select the external drive from the left sidebar. Choose verify disc. It will find and correct minor errors.
Solution 3:-
If you are connecting your external hard drive with Mac using USB Hub, check the USB hub first.
Solution 4:-
- Open Disk Utility. If your external USB drive drive faded/greyed out and unmountable?
- Connect another external drive or Pen drive to computer. This drive also not recognized drive?
- Do the proper eject from the Finder window list.
- Restart your computer and connect the external drive.
Solution 5:-
- From the Finder menu, select “Go to Finder”.
- Type the external drive path what appears under Disk Utility. Ex: /Volumes/sleekdisk
Wd External Hard Drive Driver For Mac
Solution 6:-
Drive not showing up in Finder but visible in Disk Utility?
Go to Finder window and view below the favourite list. If the drive greyed Out? Select the drive. It might visible.
Solution 7 :-
Drive not showing up in Finder but visible in Disk Utility?
Go to Finder window and view below the favourite list. If the drive greyed Out? Select the drive. It might visible.
Solution 7 :-
Wd External Hard Drive Software For Mac
- Shut down your Mac computer .
- Unplug the power cord.
- Unplug all USB connections.
- Wait 30 seconds or 5 minutes then plug it back in.
- Then turn on your MacBook Pro or iMac.
- Plug the external drive only to the USB port. Open Finder and check your drive.
Wd External Hard Drive Troubleshooting
Solution 8:-
Install and run run Onyx (maintenance freeware) or
run Kext_Utility.app.v2.6.1 and restart your Mac machine.
Solution 9:-
Some times this issue might happened because of the unsupported drive format.
Install Fuse for OS X, NTFS-3G for Mac OS X and Fuse wait.
Restart your computer and check the issue.
If the above methods not working?
Install and run run Onyx (maintenance freeware) or
run Kext_Utility.app.v2.6.1 and restart your Mac machine.
Solution 9:-
Some times this issue might happened because of the unsupported drive format.
Install Fuse for OS X, NTFS-3G for Mac OS X and Fuse wait.
Restart your computer and check the issue.
If the above methods not working?
Wd External Drive Not Working
- Install fresh OSX Yosemite.
- Connect your segate external drive or WD passport to Windows computer. Delete the partition and connect back to MacBook Pro.
If you knew any other solutions, inform us via comment.