You have a WD My Passport portable external drive and you want to make it work on both Mac and PC.

High Level View of the Steps To Making WD Passport Compatible with Mac and Windows 1. Turn on Your Mac and Log In. Look for the External Hard Drive Icon on your Desktop. Make Sure your WD My Passport External Drive is Chosen. Give Your WD My Passport External Drive a Name.

Whether it’s because you’ve a Windows PC you use at work. And when you’re home it’s easier for you to continue your work on your Mac.

Or

You need to work at home because then you can watch a sick child. Or be there when the kids come home from school.

Or it could be that you have both types of computers in your home. Your work and home life would run so much easier if you could just get the dang thing to work on both.

The question you’re asking yourself is: Can I use my WD Passport on both Mac and PC?

The answer is Yes.

And in this article I aim to inspire you to do just that.

Learn the few steps it takes to set up your WD My Passport for Mac and Windows.

High Level View of the Steps To Making WD Passport Compatible with Mac and Windows

1. You plug in the WD My Passport Into Your Mac
2. You format your WD My Passport to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) file system.
3. Next you format your WD My Passport drive to an ExFAT file system.
4. After that you can use your WD Passport on both Mac and PC.

And the whole thing takes only a few minutes to do.

____________

Plugging in Your WD My Passport Into Your Mac and PC

Before you start you’ll need to connect your drive.

You’ll either find this super easy and straight forward. Or you may need a cable or adaptor depending on the Mac and PC you have.

Your WD My Passport drive uses an external hard drive standard called USB 3.0. You don’t need to understand the ins and outs of this standard. It’s enough to know that the different USB standards define the speed the drive works at.

And the plugs used to connect the hard drive to your Mac or your Windows PC. The connection types are also known as ports.

Your WD My Passport portable drive has a USB B micro port.

Its cable comes with a connection for the USB B Micro port for the hard drive. And at the other end, the end that connects to a computer has a USB A connection.

That end looks like this.

What If you Bought a WD My Passport for Mac?

The cable supplied with the WD My Passport for Mac is different. It still has the Micro B connection for the WD My Passport for Mac drive. But on the other end it has a USB C port.

Check the USB port you have on your Mac and on your Windows PC

You may have a USB A port. Or on the newer Macs and Windows PCs you may have a USB C port. And find you’ll need an adaptor cable or device.

The USB standard is thankfully backwards compatible. So as long as you have the right cable or adaptor you’ll be fine.

My favorite cable and adaptor are: (Commissions Earned)

1. USB C to Micro B Cable, QCEs

2. Apple USB-C to USB Adapter

Click on the above links to view on Amazon.

Got the right cable for your Mac and your Windows PC. And you may find you’ll need two different cables. But that’s fine as long as you have the cable you need in the right place at the right time.

How to Make WD Passport Compatible with Mac and Windows

The method you’ll learn uses your Mac to format your WD passport for Mac and Windows.

I recommend doing it this way, as Macs can be choosy about what formats their hard drives.

And throw up issues when you format the external hard drive on a Windows PC and then you use on your Mac.

Setting up your WD My Passport drive on your Mac moves any of these issues out of the picture.

Side Note:

If you have documents, and files already on your WD My Passport drive copy them off before you start doing this.

If you can’t copy them off. Or you have no room either on the Mac or your Windows PC to put them there.

Then you’ll want to take a look at my article here. It covers the options available when you want an external hard drive working on a Mac and PC but you can’t reformat. Because you don’t want to loose the documents on there.

1. Turn on Your Mac and Log In.

Plug in your WD My Passport’s USB cable into its Micro USB B port. Then plug the other end into a USB port on your Mac.

The WD My Passport gets its power from the Mac and the drive’s LED light will start flashing as it powers up.

2. Look for the External Hard Drive Icon on your Desktop.

Or your Mac may give you a message asking whether you would like to format the WD My Passport drive.

If your Mac has asked that question select Yes.

If it hasn’t you’ll see an icon on your desktop like this.

Your WD MyPassport drive not showing up on the desktop?

Open afinder window. And click on Preferences.

Check theboxes ‘Hard Disks’ and ‘External Disks’ Compare two word documents side by side.

Now you open up a piece of software on your Mac called Disk Utility.

You’ll use Disk Utility to format your WD My Passport drive.

You find Disk Utility in the Applications folder on your Mac.

Inside the Application folder you’ll see the Utilities folder. Double click on that.

Then double click on Disk Utility.

Your other way is to search for Disk Utility via the spotlight search.

You can find Spotlight search at the top of your desktop.

Click on spotlight search and type in ‘Disk Utility’.

Double click on Disk Utility to open it up.

3. Make Sure your WD My Passport External Drive is Chosen.

You click where I’ve circled on the above picture. You click at the ‘top level’ – where you see the WD My Passport drive first listed.

A small arrow head to the left of your My Passport external drive shows the levels.

If thedrive levels are still not showing, click on view on the top left of your DiskUtility pop up window.

Then openup the view menu and click the box to show all devices. The drive and the volume.Then you’ll be find to select your drive at thetop level.

Now take a look at the top of the Disk Utility screen and click on the Erase option.

4. Give Your WD My Passport External Drive a Name.

On the next screen of Disk Utility you will be able to enter a new name for your WD My Passport drive. Why not choose a name that reflects is use on both Mac and Windows PC?

For the drive format select Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

And the Scheme is GUID Partition Map.

Click on Erase.

In a few moments the WD Passport drive is formatted.

You will format the WD My Passport drive twice. Once as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) file system. The second time as ExFAT. This will make the WD My Passport hard drive compatible with Mac and Windows PC.

5. Choose the WD My Passport Drive A Second Time.

Double click on Erase.

6. Then Select the ExFAT Format.

You have just formatted the WD Passport drive as a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) file system. This time select ExFAT from the format drop down menu.

Leave the partition map as GUID as before.

Then Select the Erase button at the bottom right of the window. Compeat advantage for mac.

Several short moments later you’re done.

The WD My Passport drive is now formatted to work on both Mac and PC. And when you plug your My Passport drive into either you will be able to see the drive, read and write files. Copy and Paste files and create folders on both Mac and PC.

7. Ejecting your WD My Passport Drive

Never just pull out your USB cable either from your Mac or your Windows PC. You need to eject the drive first.

By ejecting the drive your computer can write anything it is still holding in its memory to the hard drive. And you’ll keep the risk of corrupting your files to the smallest possible.

To Properly Eject the WD My Passport Drive.

1. On your Mac. Put your cursor over the WD My Passport Icon on the desktop.

Right click. Next click on the Eject option.

2. Wait until you can’t see the Icon on the desktop.

3. Then check the LED lights on your WD My Passport drive. When they stop flickering and you have a steady constant light you know the drive is idle.

Then you’re free to unplug the USB cable.

An Alternative Way to Eject on your Mac or for Your PC

Go to the Finder Window on your Mac or the Explorer window on Windows PC. Right click on the file icon of your WD My Passport drive there.

Choose Eject.

Wait till the icon disappears and the flickering on the drive stops. Then you can pull out the USB cable.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Why Didn’t My WD Passport Work on My Mac and PC?

WD My Passport is sold with a file system called NTFS (New Technology File System).

A file system is how the My Passport external drive stores your all your files. Whether they are documents, photos or music on the drive.

Your Mac can read NTFS. So when you plug in the drive your Mac can see the documents. And you can copy them off onto your Mac.

But you can’t write any files back, update any of the documents or delete them. This is because all those actions mean the Mac has to write to the drive and it can’t.

To write to the drive you either need third party software that allows you to do that.

There is an article on the site all about this here.

Or you reformat the drive as I have led you through in the article.

2. Why Can’t ‘WD Passport For Mac’ work on Windows?

The version of the Western Digital external drive sold in a ‘For Mac’ guise does not work on Windows. Not without some third party software or without reformatting. Why?

Because the file system on the WD Passport For Mac external hard drive is a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) file system. This file system is also call HFS+. A Windows PC cannot see, read, write to that file system.

To share that drive between a Mac and Windows PC you need software. Software that translates HFS+ into something the PC can understand.

You can take a look at the software options in my article.

Or follow the steps in this article to reformat the drive to ExFAT.

3. How to Open WD My Passport for Mac on Windows?

Because WD My Passport for Mac has a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) file system (HFS+) written on it. Your Windows PC can’t see, or open the drive.

Your options are to use a third party software solution that sits on your windows PC. This software would allow your PC to see, read and write to the drive.

You can read all about it in this document on the site.

Or you can reformat the drive to ExFAT and freely open the WD Passport without any special software on it.

4. Why ExFAT when Formatting WD Passport for Mac and Windows?

Because both your Mac and Windows PC can read and write to ExFAT.

What does this mean?

Copy your documents onto an ExFAT formatted WD My Passport drive. And plug into either computer.

Whether it’s your Mac and or your PC it will see those documents.

And use those documents on both computers. If it’s your music collection you want to enjoy and listen to on both your Mac and PC, then you can with ExFAT.

Both a Mac and a Windows PC can also read and write to FAT32 formatted drives.

Why didn’t I suggest that?

And you may see some sites suggesting you format to FAT32.

But FAT32 has a file size restriction of 4GB. OK, so you’ll likely have file sizes smaller than that.

But as the older file system standard FAT32 is slow.

Much slower than ExFAT. And ExFAT can store a file up to 16 Exibyte in size.

These days ExFAT is the file system to choose for your modern Mac and Windows PC.

Last Words

I hope I inspired you to take the 7 steps to set up your WD My Passport for your Mac and for your Windows PC. You’ll find it so much easier when you can work on your documents from either computer. See the photos you’ve stored on both or hear your favorite tunes on your Mac or PC.

Don’t just read – go ahead and give it a go. It is easy use your WD My Passport for Mac and Windows in 7 steps.

You’ll find other documents on the site all about your WD My Passport portable external hard drive. Why not take a look:

'Can anybody tell me how to perform WD My Passport for Mac HFS+ data recovery? I have a WD My Passport external hard disk with HFS+ file system and I often use it to save or backup some important data. However, today, when I plugged the WD My Passport external HDD to Mac OS, I carelessly deleted several files. I want to know how to recover data from WD My Passport external HDD on Mac.'

WD My Passport external hard drive is able to work on Mac OS for data storage, transferring or transferring. There is a 'Time Machine' on Mac Os. If you have enabled Time Machine on your disk drive, you can easily restore lost data after deleting by mistake or due to other reasons. However, if you did not enable Time Machine on Mac, you need to rely on data recovery software to restore all deleted files.

Software for Mac WD My Passport HFS+ File System Recovery

HFS+ is type of file system on Mac OS. When you mistakenly delete files from WD My Passport on Mac and there is no backup, you can use iCare Data Recovery Pro to recover lost data. This data recovery software provides a simple solution for lost data recovery from WD My Passport HFS+ disk. With this software, you are able to recover lost photos, videos, documents, emails, audio files and more from HFS+ file system disk for Mac OS. In order to use iCare Data Recovery to perform data recovery, you need to connect the WD My Passport disk to a Windows PC because this software is compatible with Windows OS. Then, you can follow the guide below to recover lost data like excel file recovery, word file recovery, powerpoint file recovery, video recovery, photo recovery, etc.

Step1. Download and install iCare Data Recovery on Windows computer. Select a proper scan mode after running the software.

Step2. Select the WD My Passport disk and then wait the software to scan it to search lost data.

Step3. Preview found files after scanning and then save the lost files to another drive.

iCare Data Recovery is available for WD My Passport HFS+ disk data recovery when you run into data loss problem due to deleting, formatting, RAW format error or other reasons. Although this software does not support Mac OS, it is available for HFS+ file system recovery on Windows PC such as Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10.

WD My Passport for Mac HFS+ Deleted File Recovery

Have you deleted any data from a HFS disk on Mac OS? When you mistakenly or intentionally delete any file from WD my passport HFS+ disk, you might be unable to restore lost data from Trash bin. Since, system will mark the disk space as empty after deleting files, it may store new added data to the disk space. If you still want to perform deleted file recovery from the WD HFS+ disk, it is very important to stop writing even a single file to the disk.

WD My Passport for Mac Formatted HFS+ Disk Recovery

You probably format Seagate backup plus slim on Mac and delete all data from the HFS+ disk? Every person makes such a mistake more or less. Before writing new files to the formatted HFS+ disk, iCare Data Recovery enables you to restore almost all lost data. iCare Data Recovery works on Windows OS to help you recover data from formatted WD my passport disk Although this software does not support Mac OS, it allows you to recover data from HFS+ file system after formatting.

WD My Passport for Mac HFS+ File System Changes to RAW

Whether you delete file or format HFS+ disk, at least the disk can still work normally. When WD my passport external HDD changes to RAW file system, the disk will stop working normally. In this situation, you are unable to read or write data on the disk. The only thing you are allowed to do is to format the disk from RAW back to HFS+ file system. If WD my passport converts its file system from HFS+ to RAW on Mac, you should not format it unless you do not have any data on this disk. iCare Data Recovery is available for data recovery when WD my passport for Mac cannot work due to RAW drive error.

Advices for for Mac HFS+ Data Recovery

iCare Data Recovery helps WD my passport for Mac HFS+ data recovery after deleting, formatting or when the HFS+ disk turns to RAW and requires formatting and more other situations. There are two key points for WD my passport external HFS+ disk file recovery. The first key point is that you should always avoid overwriting the previous lost data no matter how it got lost. The other key point is that you have chance to perform data recovery only condition that the external HDD does not suffer physical damage.

Related Articles