Important: Please note if this is the first time connecting an external device to a macOS, there is a Reformatting Required for Mac OS Compatibility, please see Answer ID 3879: Reformatting Required for Mac OS Compatibility. Once the process begins, ALL THE DATA ON THE DRIVE WILL BE LOST!Ĭritical: Western Digital recommends that when formatting a drive that it be the only drive present on the system to limit occurences of accidental data loss. This process is Data Destructive and cannot be undone. Please note the instructions do not differ when formatting different capacity sizes, this is not capacity specific.Ĭritical: The instructions in the article below are designed to help repartition and format a hard drive. Internal HDD and internal SSD drives do not ship pre-formatted and will need to be Partitioned and formatted before being used. External hard drives and external solid state drives come pre-formatted and ready for use for the specific OS it's pre-formatted.
