“I recently bought a Western Digital Passport external hard drive and plan on using it for my Mac. On the box it says the hard drive needs to be formatted for the Mac. How do I format the external hard drive for the Mac?”
1. Plug the external hard drive into your Mac via USB.
2. With the hard drive plugged into your Mac open up ‘Disk Utility’. This program can be found in Applications inside the Utilities folder.
3. Inside Disk Utility – Find the drive name on the left side and click on it to highlight the drive.
4. Click the ‘Erase’ button.
5. In the Format section, click and select ‘Mac OS Extended (Journaled)’ from the list. You can also name the drive if you want to. The name can be changed at anytime. This will erase all files from the drive. Back up any files you’ve put on the drive before proceeding.
6. Click the ‘Erase’ button at the bottom when you’re ready. You will need to confirm this action. The drive will now be formatting.
7. To confirm that it’s been properly formatted click on the drive name on the left side and view the info at the bottom of the screen.
