


Note: if your hard drive is not showing on the left panel, it must have been hidden. Select that disk and click the “Erase” button, the one highlighted in red in the screenshot below. It should show up on the left panel under “External”. I decided to click on the view button at the top right corner of my disk utility app and I had 'Show Only Volumes' selected. I could not mount my hard drives and it would not let me repair, erase, nor partition them, an old and a new one. Therefore, it is better to take backup of your important photos and videos before sharing them between both the computers.When I plugged in my external hard drive it showed up in my drive in Disk Utility but it was grayed out. The corruption chances of the external drive increases, if it is used on both Mac and PC systems regularly.Like FAT32, ex-FAT is not a very commonly used file system, due to which its support may vary among third-party devices.Ex-FAT supports maximum volume size up to 128 PiB, and its supported maximum file size is 128 PiB.Therefore, it is better to choose ex-FAT instead. Due to some limitations FAT32 format is not useful for every type of user, and also affects both Mac’s and PC’s performances.There are specific third-party systems, like Digital Camcorders, and Sony PlayStation 3, which need the drives to be formatted in either FAT32 or ex-FAT format to perform read from and write operation.Format your Western Digital My Passport external hard drive to FAT32 or ex-FAT format so to transfer the data between a Mac and Windows system conveniently.Once formatting is done, you can use the drive in macOS or OS X as a regular hard drive.Now, click the ‘Erase,’ button and wait a few minutes and let the macOS erase data on the drive and reformat it by FAT32 or ex-FAT format.Now, the Erase dialogue window appears, here select the ‘Volume Format’ drop-down list and choose ‘MS-DOS (FAT)’ or ex-FAT File System.’ Note: ex-FAT is a better choice for formatting WD My Passport on Mac. Click ‘Erase’ on the Disk Utility file menu.When the Disk Utility opens, choose the Western Digital hard drive icon from the sidebar.From the Utilities folder window, select ‘Disk Utility’ application. When the Finder window opens, on the menu bar, select ‘Go’ and then ‘Utilities.’ After that, you will be able to see /Applications/Utilities folder in Finder. Now, a new hard drive icon will appear on the desktop. Connect your Western Digital My Passport drive to Mac computer, and let the OS detect and mount the drive for use.After successful formatting, you can directly save or move files to it like any other external hard drive. 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.
