How To Reformat A Western Digital Hard Drive For Mac
I have a Lacie d2 Quadra 1tb External Hard Drive. I had it for years on a Mac. But unfortunately it bit the dust and I decided to get a PC. Now either because of time, corruption or because it may. Find an external hard drive with RAID for data protection, backup software or super-fast USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt technology to back up photos and digital media.
Little tidbit. When you buy a Western Digital (WD) 1 TB My Book External Hard Drive, they usually come formatted for Windows using FAT32. Of course, if you are using it with a Mac, then you’ll want to reformat it using Mac OS Extended (HFS+).
The problem: When you try to reformat in Disk Utility, you’ll get a very cryptic error that says that there was an unknown error with the partition map. The solution: If you go to the partition map and click the “Options” button, you’ll be able to select which scheme to use for the boot records.
It turns out, if the boot record scheme is set to “Master Boot Record”, you will not be able to format it as Mac OS Extended. Flipping it to GUID or Apple Partition Map will work. Once you get to that magic dialog, it’s pretty clear what to do. Why Apple doesn’t communicate this error intelligibly when you attempt to format I don’t know. In any case, there is that saved the day for me. I’m posting it here just in case it saves the day for someone else.
I’m now ready to try out Apple Time Machine for the first time Update (): It’s amazing, but this continues to be one of the most popular posts on this blog. Everyone seems to have this problem. Interestingly, it’s not unique to Western Digital drives. I find that I need to do this with Maxtor and Seagate Free Agent drives also. I just did this with the new Seagate FreeAgent 1.5 TB external.
Works like a charm. This is a great external hard drive for expanding your digital storage capacity. I was in need for added storage and wanted to go for the 2TB WD Elements External Hard Drive. I wasn’t really happy with the prices I was seeing for the 2TB hard drive, and that is when I decided to check up on the 1.5TB drives.
I was amazed at the price Amazon was offering these drives and I got two of them. (My work requires that kind of storage space) I got 3TB worth of storage for the price of a 2TB External hard drive! That said, let us talk about the performance of these drives – 1) Build and form factor – Nice sleek looking enclosures. All black, the sides are fingerprint magnets with a glossy finish.
Reformat External Hard Drive Windows
The top and bottom panels have a matte finish. Looks matter to me, even if it just an external drive.
The microUSB and AC sockets are closely spaced with a small white indicator light besides them. All in all very compact, sleek, and aesthetically pleasing device. 2) Performance – I am getting constantly good speeds on these drives. Reads at 30MB/s and writes at about 24MB/s, which is good and fast enough for my needs. As always, users have to be careful with all hard drives, internal or external.
I am handling my drives with the utmost care. I don’t want to lose any important data. Finally, this drive is a complete value for money purchase. I say go for it if you are out looking for a large capacity external hard drive. I realize this is an old post but I’ve gotten myself into quite a fix. I purchased a 1T WD external hard drive for my iMac 10.7.2 but didn’t format it or partition it.
Due to a series of apparent blunders, I can’t access anything I’ve copied to the WD nor can I unmount it (either on this mac or any of my other macs) Disk Utility will not allow me to partition or erase the drive because it is unable to unmount the disk. I’ve closed all applications, rebooted the computer, the finder, etc. There seems to be no interference as far as applications go and I’m completely flummoxed. Can you possibly help me figure this out? Many thanks, Joyce. Adam Nash EIR @ Greylock Partners. Previously Wealthfront, LinkedIn, eBay, Apple.
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