Hey Guys, I have WD My Passport 0830 External Hard Drive. I borrowed it from my brother and I plug it on my mac. When I'm abou

mishpootato · May 5, 2016

Hey Guys, I have WD My Passport 0830 External Hard Drive. I borrowed it from my brother and I plug it on my mac. When I'm about to copy my file to hard drive, it just can't. So I searched on how to do it and it asked me to erase it on mac and make it compatible for it. I succeed on doing so.

The problem now is that now my brother's windows PC can't use it as it is and can only be shown under devices and printers.

I also know that there are some default file on the hard drive that I thought was not important which I deleted.

Please help! He's asking me to pay if I won't fix it. I know there is a solution for it! I found some NTFS and Fat 32 stuff but I can't seem to understand well. Please give me some step by step fix.

SuperSoph_WD · May 5, 2016

Welcome to the TH community, mishpootato!

In order to be able to use it on both Windows OS and Mac OS X systems, you'd need the FAT32 file system indeed.
You should be able to reformat & partition the HDD using FAT32 on either the PC or the Mac.

However, you should also be aware of some file and partition size limitations that come with this file system.

Hope these tutorials from our knowledge base help you out.

Keep me posted if you encounter any issues!
SuperSoph_WD

Solandri · May 5, 2016

FAT32 has a 4GB max file size limit. It also uses 8.3 filenames natively, which can lead to confusing differences in filenames on the Mac vs on the PC.

You want to be using exFAT instead. One of the reasons it exists is for sharing disks between PCs and Macs. I hear though that it works better if you format the drive as exFAT under Windows. It supports filenames up to 256 character natively, and the max file size is 16 billion GB.

HFS+ (native Mac format) = read/write on OS X, inaccessible on Windows
NTFS (native Windows format) = read-only on OS X, read/write on Windows
exFAT = read/write on OS X, read/write on Windows

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Hey Guys, I have WD My Passport 0830 External Hard Drive. I borrowed it from my brother and I plug it on my mac. When I'm abou

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