Erase WD My Passport for Mac: A Step-by-Step Guide

If you recently purchased a WD My Passport external hard drive to back up your Mac, you may have noticed that it's not automatically recognized by your computer. The reason is that the drive is preformatted with NTFS, a file system that works with Windows but not with macOS. In this article, we'll show you how to format your WD My Passport for use on your Mac.

The first step is to download and install macFUSE, an open-source product that allows you to mount and read the files on your drive. Once installed, connect your WD My Passport to your Mac and open Finder. You should see the drive listed under 'Devices' or 'Volumes.'

To format your drive, you'll need to use the Terminal app. Open Terminal and type `sudo nano /etc/fstab` to edit the file system table. This will allow you to specify the file system and permissions for each drive.

Next, copy the following line into the file, replacing DRIVENAME with the actual name of your WD My Passport drive:

LABEL=DRIVENAME none ntfs rw,auto,nobrowse

Hit Ctrl+O to save the file, then Ctrl+X to quit Nano. This will remount your drive and make it available in /Volumes.

Finally, you can use Finder to format your drive with a Mac-compatible file system like HFS+. To do this, open Finder and click 'Go' in the menu bar, then select 'Go to

Erase wd my passport for mac