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Cannot format new external drive

robertcoogan

robertcoogan

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Apr 5, 2008
844
1,258
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:
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!
 
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.
 
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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?
 
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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DeltaMac said:
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.
Click to expand...

This didn't work. Though it did give me the error that I didn't have ownership of the volume.
 
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/
 
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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.
 
bbplayer5 said:
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.
Click to expand...
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
 
DeltaMac said:
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.
Click to expand...
Legend! this totally worked with my Toshiba portable! so happy right now.. thanks
 
Darmok N Jalad said:
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?
Click to expand...

When the walls fell.

Best part of this thread is you handle.
 
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