MacBook External Hard Drive Not Recognized - How to Reformat Western Digital Hard Drive for Mac

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Hard drives often have to be formatted to work on MacBooks and Apple Desktops, but I definitely had some difficulty getting my Windows NTFS formatted Western Digital drive to be recognized on my MacBook. The good news is that I just figured out how to get this to work and I’ll show you how to fix this on your own computer by the end of the video!

The Western Digital drive I bought is Windows NTFS formatted and not Mac friendly so the first thing I did was try to simply format it. But that resulted in an error saying “MediaKit reports not enough space on device for requested operation”. So I was confused on how there is not enough space? It's a one terabyte drive and I kept getting that error every time I tried to format it. I tried some other stuff and eventually got a message saying that the disk was unreadable and it needs to be initialized.

Please watch the video for the exact steps needed to reformat the drive so the Apple operating system can recognize the drive and allow you to read and write files to it.

I know computer problems can be frustrating but I hope this video will help you with your MacBook or your Apple desktop. Please hit the thumbs up button if you enjoyed this video and don’t forget to subscribe to my channel so you won’t miss any of my weekly videos!

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[lizlivinglife]

Thank you so much. I wouldn’t have worked out any of that. Many many thanks.

[neerajkulkarni]

straight to the point! Thank you so much

[norfsidedre]

What do we do now that the drivers aren't supported anymore?

[iedolphins]

After I did everything, it says "unmounted" and still I am not able to open my external drive. Ca you help me?

[PurplerainGaming]

When I hit erase it doesn’t erase, it’s stuck in creating partition map, please help

[chonrae]

God bless you, Sir!! You just rescued my poor little confused brain!!

[anahitadsouza]

Omg I absolutely love you for making this. Was running around like a headless chicken before this.

[TheLifeofRon]

This helped me! Thank you so much I was so frustrated when I got this hard drive and this short video saved me from putting a bullet in this hard drive.

[becca]

what happens if you already have files on the drive? what should i do first?

[DisneyVegemite]

bro MINE WAS A DRIVE WITH STUFF ALREADY ON IT. You just made me delete all my shit 😭😭😭

[LivingIrving]

Thank you I was about to return this hard drive thinking it was broken lol. This tutorial help me instantly ❤️

[caseyallred]

Followed your instructions and it all worked perfectly! Thank you so much for helping me when I had no idea what to do!

[h.sheikh]

I have the same issue with my WD Elements however I cannot erase it as it is not new and contains my data. Any chance the same can be easily restored and the hard disk be remounted?

[pedranotme]

I have exactly this problem, but my hard drive has a lot of important stuff.. i cant erase..
what do i do ?? :(

[dsalangsang]

Just bought a WD elements 5TB and this video was perfect in explaining exactly what I needed to do to use it with my macbook. Short and sweet. Thanks for this!

[patrickhall]

when i click on disk utility the hard drive doesnt show up?

[triciacilento]

This was a tremendous help after spending much time and energy. Truly appreciate your concise, easy to follow tutorial. Thanks for taking the time to help.

[johndavies]

I keep getting an "Erase Process has Failed" message? Any thoughts

[Mamobo]

THANK YOU SO MUCH! I have been frustrated with this for hours and it finally worked!

[soumyaarora]

OH SWEET LORD, THIS SAVED ME AFTER ALL THE HASSLE I WENT THROUGH FIXING THE ISSUE!! THANK YOU <3