Wait till the Windows detects the external hard drive and configure it as an expansion drive automatically.Ģ. Connect your Western Digital My Passport hard drive to your Windows PC through the USB cable. 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. However, while doing this, there are things you have to keep in mind and follow the correct steps. To format a Western Digital My Passport external hard drive in ex-FAT or FAT32 format, you can bank on built-in applications of Mac & PC. 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.

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. A WD My Passport formatted with Mac file system will be a dud on the Windows and vice-versa. We know, Macs and Windows have their native file systems such as the new APFS or HFS and the NTFS. But despite the best of the best device specifications there remains one small glitch to rectify. 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. 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. Professional Photographers and videographers have their hands laid upon various digital devices. Take a free trial to evaluate the software now. 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.

In this blog post, we will walk you through the formatting process and share instructions to format an external drive on macOS & Windows.īut before you proceed, understand that formatting carries a risk of hard drive corruption and data loss. Summary: Let’s figure out how to format your WD Passport on macOS & Windows. Well, that makes sense, because the driver had some software installed, also installed an icon on the top bar called WD Discovery and I can't get rid of it.But it doesn't make sense because the only way I was able to format the drive was with a mac mini running Snow Leopard.

Western digital fat32 formatting