This could quickly damage the drive's partition and corrupt the data on the drive. Never attempt to connect any external drive to multiple computers at the same time. Western Digital recommends that when formatting a drive that it be the only drive present on the system to limit occurences of accidental data loss. Once the process begins, ALL THE DATA ON THE DRIVE WILL BE LOST!

This process is Data Destructive and cannot be undone. The instructions in the article below are designed to help repartition and format a hard drive. The easiest way to format the drive to FAT32 or ExFAT is by using macOS's built-in Disk Utility for FAT32, or both macOS and Windows' built-in tools, Disk Utility or Disk Management respectively for exFAT. For more information about what these limitations are please see Answer ID 20778: FAT32 File System and Partition Size Limits for Windows & macOS. This is a file system limitation that affects both macOS's and Window's, and the only workaround is to format the drive to exFAT. FAT32 has several limitations, including a 4 GB per-file limit. Most WD Drives come formatted in the NTFS (Windows) or HFS+ (macOS) format.įor a hard drive to be able to be read from and written to on both a Windows and macOS computer, it must be formatted to ExFAT or FAT32 file format. This is useful if a drive is being used under both Operating System (OS) to move files between the two environments.

Answer ID 50277: Format an External Drive as exFat using Windows for use on Windows and macOS Guided AssistĪnswer ID 50276: Format an External Drive as exFat using macOS for use on macOS and Windows Guided AssistĪ Western Digital external hard drive can be used on both Windows and macOS.

Windows format disk for mac