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

In this blog post, we will walk you through the formatting process and share instructions to format an external drive on macOS Windows.

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

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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.

Professional Photographers and videographers have their hands laid upon various digital devices.

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.

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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.

We know, Macs and Windows have their native file systems such as the new APFS or HFS and the NTFS.

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.

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.

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.

In Windows Platform: 1.

Connect your Western Digital My Passport hard drive to your Windows PC through the USB cable.

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

Now, click the Start button and select This PC.

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.

Locate the icon assigned to Western Digital My Passport drive and Right-click the connected drive icon and click Format in the pop-up menu.

Select the File System from the drop-down list, which is available in the format expansion and choose either ex-FAT or FAT32.

Enter a relevant name in the Volume Label field.

Therefore, enter a descriptive name.

Now, again select a Quick Format option, then click Start option, wait for a few minutes to get your drive reformatted with the FAT32 file system, so that you can use it.

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.

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

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