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robertcoogan

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Apr 5, 2008
842
1,257
Joshua Tree, California
I have tried to reformat a new WD 4TB external USB - it arrived NTFS (shocker).

I at first tried to reformat the drive to AFPS, and that failed. The drive wouldn't even mount, and only appeared grayed out in Disk Utility (as disk4 - I have 3 mounted).

Then I tried to reformat it JHFS+, that also failed. Same error.

Then I tried to do both formats in Terminal. That also failed.

Each time, I can connect it to Windows 10, and it pops up as a "Healthy" partition. I reformat it anyway as NTFS, and went back to macOS, only to encounter the same errors. So I went back to Windows 10, and reformatted it as FAT 32. Same errors on macOS. Then back to Windows 10. Then I tried exFAT. Back to macOS. Same errors. I have even tried Tuxera, that also fails.

Does anyone know how to get macOS to reformat this drive as either AFPS or JHFS+? I returned 2 drives to Amazon for the same reason - I thought the drive was defective.

Help!
 
Last edited:

dianeoforegon

macrumors 6502a
Apr 26, 2011
907
137
Oregon
I just got the a new WD 4TB My Book and had similar issues formatting. First DO NOT format as APFS. You only format SSD drives with APFS. Time Machine will not even run on an APFS drive.

Shut down and boot into your Mac with Shift key down. You should see Safe Boot in the top right corner in red.
Make sure all other external drives are removed.
Follow directions here: https://support.wdc.com/knowledgebase/answer.aspx?h=p1&ID=3865&lang=en&p=119#highsierra
You might need to toggle Show all devices on/off to see any changes.
Check under Partition to make sure you see only one partition. I didn't see the correct formatting and partitioning until I restarted.
partition.png

partition.png


Every time I tried to erase, it created another partition that was the size of the drive. Remove was also grayed out.

Hope this helps!
 

Darmok N Jalad

macrumors 603
Sep 26, 2017
5,421
48,228
Tanagra (not really)
Don’t try to format a spinning drive to APFS. That’s really only for SSDs.

When in Disk Utility, click on the box in the upper left corner to have it display devices. From there, try selecting the highest level of that disk, and try to erase it. Set it up as GUID.
 

robertcoogan

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Apr 5, 2008
842
1,257
Joshua Tree, California

Darmok N Jalad

macrumors 603
Sep 26, 2017
5,421
48,228
Tanagra (not really)
It might just be easier to get an external HDD enclosure of your liking and a bare 4GB drive. Not sure what WD is doing to their premade drives, but that is odd that it doesn’t even mount in MacOS. Do you have a link to the product you bought?
 

DeltaMac

macrumors G5
Jul 30, 2003
13,751
4,575
Delaware
Connect the drive to your Mac.
Open Disk Utility.
Press Command-2 (which toggles the View menu to Show All Devices.)
The top item in External will be your W-D device - Select that top item under External.
Now, click Erase. You will get an erase window.
Name your drive, whatever you like.
Change Format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled), and change Scheme to either Apple Partition Map, or GUID Partition Map.
And, finally, Click the Erase button in that Window. Should only take a few seconds.
Mounting the drive - that should not be an issue when erasing, unless it does not allow the drive to mount after erasing is complete.
 
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robertcoogan

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Apr 5, 2008
842
1,257
Joshua Tree, California
Connect the drive to your Mac.
Open Disk Utility.
Press Command-2 (which toggles the View menu to Show All Devices.)
The top item in External will be your W-D device - Select that top item under External.
Now, click Erase. You will get an erase window.
Name your drive, whatever you like.
Change Format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled), and change Scheme to either Apple Partition Map, or GUID Partition Map.
And, finally, Click the Erase button in that Window. Should only take a few seconds.
Mounting the drive - that should not be an issue when erasing, unless it does not allow the drive to mount after erasing is complete.

This didn't work. Though it did give me the error that I didn't have ownership of the volume.
 

vddobrev

macrumors 6502a
Oct 28, 2016
962
833
Haskovo, Bulgaria
Can you try this in Terminal, I recently purchased a WD Elements 2TB USB3 and had the same issue:

1. diskutil list
(identify your drive, it should be under external, physical, for example disk2)

2. diskutil unmountDisk force disk2
(replace disk2 with your identifier from step 1)

3. sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk2 bs=1024 count=1024
(replace disk2 with your identifier from step 1)

4. diskutil partitionDisk disk2 GPT JHFS+ "MyDisk" 0g
(replace disk2 with your identifier from step 1, and MyDisk with whatever name you want)

Credit: https://priyanksharma.com/tech/mediakit-reports-not-enough-space-on-device-for-requested-operation/
 

bbplayer5

macrumors 68040
Apr 13, 2007
3,133
1,141
I gave up on disk utility for now. I had the same issue where I couldn't partition a drive. I just ended up installing windows in a VM, mounting the drive there, and formatting it that way. I don't know why Apple can't make disk utility an actual utility worth using.
 

vddobrev

macrumors 6502a
Oct 28, 2016
962
833
Haskovo, Bulgaria
I gave up on disk utility for now. I had the same issue where I couldn't partition a drive. I just ended up installing windows in a VM, mounting the drive there, and formatting it that way. I don't know why Apple can't make disk utility an actual utility worth using.
I am sorry you gave up. Yes, it needs a little reading, but it is a powerful tool: this is an old manual, but from terminal you can invoke the latest with "man diskutil" - https://developer.apple.com/legacy/...arwin/Reference/ManPages/man8/diskutil.8.html
 

TheHawk72

macrumors newbie
Oct 17, 2018
1
0
Connect the drive to your Mac.
Open Disk Utility.
Press Command-2 (which toggles the View menu to Show All Devices.)
The top item in External will be your W-D device - Select that top item under External.
Now, click Erase. You will get an erase window.
Name your drive, whatever you like.
Change Format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled), and change Scheme to either Apple Partition Map, or GUID Partition Map.
And, finally, Click the Erase button in that Window. Should only take a few seconds.
Mounting the drive - that should not be an issue when erasing, unless it does not allow the drive to mount after erasing is complete.
Legend! this totally worked with my Toshiba portable! so happy right now.. thanks
 

aspectzer0

macrumors newbie
Jul 26, 2019
1
1
It might just be easier to get an external HDD enclosure of your liking and a bare 4GB drive. Not sure what WD is doing to their premade drives, but that is odd that it doesn’t even mount in MacOS. Do you have a link to the product you bought?

When the walls fell.

Best part of this thread is you handle.
 
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