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.
If you buy a new external hard drive, you may notice that working between Mac and PC is an often difficult - but it doesn't need to be. We'll show you everything you need to know about the. Feb 01, 2016 I formatted my WD external hard drive for Mac in order to use it to transfer data to my PC. It worked fine and I copied the data onto it. But now, my PC doesn't read it. It knows it's there-it shows it on Devices and Printers and gives me the option to eject it-but I can't open it to retrieve the data. After successful formatting, you can directly save or move files to it like any other external hard drive. In macOS / OS X Platform. Connect your Western Digital My Passport drive to Mac computer, and let the OS detect and mount the drive for use. Now, a new hard drive icon will appear on the desktop. On macOS Dock, select Finder. Anyone who uses a Mac computer knows that the included internal hard drive tends to fill up quickly. The best solution, especially for those using a portable Mac, is an external hard drive. Read on for our reviews of five top models and find the best external hard drive for Macs. Oct 20, 2019 Plug the external hard drive into your Mac and use the drive. You’ll probably pay extra for this preformatting convenience. And sometimes you’ll find that you end up reformatting anyway. Well a Mac is a Mac and is sometimes precious about its external hard drive. Your Mac may prefer the drive formatted by a Mac.
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. https://starnew578.weebly.com/blog/mytunes-for-mac. 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”. 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:
Audacity for mac. 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.
Summary: If you receive the error message: 'The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer' when plugging a WD external hard drive into your Mac, try 5 solutions to repair unreadable external hard drives in this article. Worry about losing data? You can recover files from this WD drive with iBoysoft Mac Data Recovery at first.
External hard drives make it much easier to store, transfer, and back up files on Mac. That is the reason why WD external hard drives are preferred by so many users. However, it is possible that your WD hard drive becomes unreadable suddenly. Shocked when your computer can't read your external hard disk?
As a matter of fact, external hard drives becoming not readable on Mac is a general issue. But you don't have to worry now because this article will tell you why your WD exterbnal hard drive is not readable by your Mac, and then it will include 5 solutions to repair this unreadable external hard drive easily.
If you plug a WD external hard drive to your Mac but your computer is unable to read it, you may be facing the same disk problem as the following query from Apple Community:
I tried to connect my 1TB WD external hard drive to my MacBook Pro today. It makes a musical, three 'note' sounds. But then my computer tells me: 'The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer'. I am totally at a loss. I don't know why my drive becomes unreadable and I really need the files on the drive. Is there any method that can fix this not readable WD external hard drive? Can I get my lost files back?
The truth is, most people are noobs, and they use external hard drives just for simple storage and backup. As a result, when their hard disk suddenly won't work on Mac computers, they are left high and dry.
Then exactly, why your WD external hard disk suddenly becomes unreadable?
Why your external hard drive is not readable by Mac computers?
What causes external drive not readable by this computer? The reasons are varied.
Here are the main reasons:
File system corruption: Mac can't read your external hard drive because of the file system corruption. Most of the time, if your drive is infected with virus, or you ejected this drive without unmounting it, the partition table or directory structure of this drive could be damaged. And these internal file system errors would make your hard disk unreadable.
Component failure: This is one of the most common causes, especially when the unreadable HDD is producing some unusual sounds like ticking, buzzing, etc. If this is your case, you'd better send this disk to some disk repair services because your external hard drive probably has been physically damaged.
Also, factors like faulty connections, power failure, etc. could also be the troublemaker. But no matter what the reason is, this problem needs to be fixed as soon as possible for sure.
How to fix/repair WD external hard drive not readable on Mac?
There are 5 solutions you can try to solve this 'disk not readable' issue, and you can check them one by one.
Solution 1: Reconnect this external hard drive to your Mac
First of all, you can try your luck by re-connecting. Simply unmount it and eject it safely. Then, plug this WD external hard drive into your computer and attempt to access it again. If this error still pops up, you could move on to the next method.
Solution 2: Check if your USB drive is supplied with enough power
Lack of power could be the cause that your Mac won't read this drive. Therefore, you can check this power information and then fix your disk problem possibly.
Step 1: Click on the Apple logo at the upper left of your desktop.
Step 2: Choose About This Mac and select System Report.
Step 3: Find and select USB in the left sidebar, then your USB devices will be listed in the right.
Step 4: Select your WD external hard drive and go through its information.
Step 5: You will find the Current Available (mA) and Current Required (mA) columns. You can do your math and see if your disk drive is lack of power. If so, you can eject some unnecessary devices so that this WD drive can have enough power supply.
How To Reformat Wd EasystoreSolution 3: Update your USB driverWd External Hard Drive Setup For Mac
Still can't access this drive? Well, if your disk is connected through USB port instead of Thunderbolt, then you can check whether your USB driver is outdated or not.
To check if any updates are available, please do the following:
Step 1: Click on the Apple in the upper left corner of the screen
![]()
Step 2: Select App store...
Wd External Hard Drive For Mac Reviews
Step 3: Any software or macOS updates available will be listed here, and you are able to download them. Or else, you will be told your software is up to date.
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:
Step 1: Click Launchpad at the dock of your Mac and go to Other.
Step 2: Find and open Disk Utility.
Step 3: Choose the unreadable WD external drive on the left sidebar.
Step 4: Click First Aid in the top center and then click Run to repair this disk.
But if the external hard drive is greyed out in Disk Utility, you need to move to the next solution. Volume mixer mac 破解版.
Solution 5: Recover data and reformat the WD external hard drive
If First Aid is unable to repair this disk, the file system of your drive could be seriously damaged or even corrupted. In this case, you can only reformat the drive with a new file system.
Tips: You should not erase this disk immediately if you have important files on this drive, because reformatting will delete data on this drive and you will lose your files consequently. So, please make sure that you have a copy of data backup. If you didn't make any backup before, then you can recover these files with a reliable data recovery tool.
If you don't worry about data loss and just want to repair this external drive, you can move forward to Step 2 in this part.
How to recover data from unreadable WD external hard drives?
There is a large amount of data recovery software available online, so you can select a professional and good-quality utility to have a try. Here iBoysoft Mac Data Recovery is used as an example.
iBoysoft Mac Data Recovery is free data recovery software that can recover data from unreadable external hard drives. It can recover files from external hard drives of WD, Seagate, Toshiba, etc. Moreover, this data recovery program can recover data from unrecognized external hard drives and recover data from corrupted/formatted/unmountable external hard drives. If files like photos are deleted from SD cards, USB flash drives, memory cards, etc. iBoysoft Mac Data Recovery can also be a helper. You can use this Mac data recovery on macOS 10.14/10.13/10.12 and Mac OS X 10.11/10.10/10.9/10.8/10.7.
Step 1: Recover data from unreadable external hard drives with iBoysoft Mac Data Recovery
1. Download and install iBoysoft Mac Data Recovery on Mac.
2. Launch iBoysoft Mac Data Recovery.
Wd External Hard Drive For Mac Power
3. Select the not readable WD external hard drive and click 'Next' button to scan all lost data.
4. Preview the searching results, choose files we need, and click 'Recover' to restore files.
5. Have a check to ensure we have got all lost data back.
Step 2: Reformat the unreadable WD external hard drive
After successfully recovered all lost data, you can fix not readable WD external hard drive by formatting. The operation below is about how to reformat an external hard drive on a Mac computer.
Format Wd External Hard Drive For MacConclusion:Wd External Hard Drive For Mac And Windows
Hope this article can help you to fix the 'disk is not readable' issue without losing any file. If you can't repair this disk with the solutions above, it's better to recover data from this unreadable external hard drive with iBoysoft Mac Data Recovery, and then send it to a local repair store for good.
Comments are closed.
|
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |