Best Format Drive And Pc Portable Media To

A silly man-made mistake will permanently remove all of the contained pictures, videos, audio files, and docs instantly from the WD My Passport.

But before you proceed, understand that formatting carries a risk of hard drive corruption and data loss.

So, in case, if you had accidentally lost your data due to drive formatting or corruption, we also recommend a data recovery software that can rescue data from your HDD.

Usually, their arsenal includes a cutting-edge Windows 10 desktop, the latest and the magnificent MacBook Pro, DSLR SD-Cards of-course and the trusted loved external drives such as the WD My Passport.

Best Format Drive And Pc Portable Media To

The role of the WD My Passport drive is crucial since the individual will leverage the portable media to safely store their collection of pictures, videos, audio, and docs.

But despite the best of the best device specifications; there remains one small glitch to rectify.

A WD My Passport formatted with Mac file system will be a dud on the Windows and vice-versa.

Thankfully, MS-DOS FAT32 and ex-FAT formats have survived to date, and these are the file system to make your WD My Passport work with a Mac and a Windows PC simultaneously.

In the next 5 minutes read, you will master yourself in formatting a WD My Passport safely and in a manner best suited for sharing your digital files between a macOS and Windows OS.

However, while doing this, there are things you have to keep in mind and follow the correct steps.

Here you will get to know about the process to format your My passport portable drive in FAT32 and ex-FAT file system in both Windows and Mac platforms.

Wait till the Windows detects the external hard drive and configure it as an expansion drive automatically.

A new Windows Explorer window opens, on the left side of the screen; you will see a list of installed drives and their drive letters.

This name will represent your drive when you connect it with Windows Explorer or Mac and will be mentioned above the drive letter for the My Passport drive.

After successful formatting, you can directly save or move files to it like any other external hard drive.

When the Finder window opens, on the menu bar, select Go and then Utilities.

After that, you will be able to see ApplicationsUtilities folder in Finder.

From the Utilities folder window, select Disk Utility application.

When the Disk Utility opens, choose the Western Digital hard drive icon from the sidebar.

Now, the Erase dialogue window appears, here select the Volume Format drop-down list and choose MS-DOS (FAT) or ex-FAT File System.

Note: ex-FAT is a better choice for formatting WD My Passport on Mac.

Now, click the Erase, button and wait a few minutes and let the macOS erase data on the drive and reformat it by FAT32 or ex-FAT format.

Once formatting is done, you can use the drive in macOS or OS X as a regular hard drive.

You dont require any third-party software to format your WD My Passport with FAT or ex-FAT.

Best Format Drive For Mac And Pc