Wd External Hard Drive Tool For Mac

Portable external hard drives with a wide array of options to store and back up your photos and files. Find the perfect drive, for gaming, RAID or wireless streaming. You can format your external hard drive from either the PC or Mac. Just keep in mind if you want to use your drive also for OS X’s Time Machine backups, we advise you to format your drive through Mac because there is an additional step to make drive compatible with “Time Machine Backups”.

Query 1:

My 500GB WD external hard drive when really fine before i upgrade my OS to mountain lion, but after i install the mountain lion software, it did not want to recognize my HD. When i plugged in to my macbook pro, it just did not show any tab of my HD. How to resolve this? All my important files are in the HD. Portable external hard drives with a wide array of options to store and back up your photos and files. Find the perfect drive, for gaming, RAID or wireless streaming.

Wd External Hard Drive Tool For Mac

Help, I’m in trouble. I lost my precious data from my Western Digital 2 TB external hard drive due to accidental formatting. Does there exist a solution through which I can recover my data from my WD external hard drive? Note: I am using MacBook Pro with macOS Mojave.

Query 2:

Hello, my 2 TB WD My Passport Ultra external hard drive was not recognizable anymore when connected to my MacBook with macOS Mojave. The drive contained essential data, which I desperately want it back. I would appreciate any data recovery advice, thanks!

Solution: Comfort yourself, as there are easy & powerful techniques through which you can recover your lost data on macOS Mojave. Go through the methods mentioned in this blog to get back your precious data from the erased or unreadable WD external hard drive.

Icebreaker

Knowing your Western Digital (WD) external hard drive is essential in recovering your lost data. Your hard drive is an electromechanical non-volatile data storage device that stores data permanently on a rotating platter coated with the ferromagnetic material. The magnetic head of the WD hard drive writes or reads data to or from the platter. These data are stored in a series of logical blocks or sectors.

macOS Mojave maintains the information of these files as metadata stored in the file system of the drive. When you delete a file, macOS Mojave updates its metadata information. Also, when you erase a drive, Mojave creates a fresh file system. In both situations, data stored in the sectors remain unharmed—This gives a chance for data recovery.

Mounting an External Hard Drive

WD external hard drive mounts on your macOS Mojave when you connect it to your MacBook. Mounting makes the drive available for use and is visible in Finder and Disk Utility. In case the storage drive is corrupt, the file system information is lost, which makes the hard drive un-mountable or unreadable on macOS Mojave.

The only way to create a new file system is by erasing the un-mountable/unrecognizable external hard drive with APFS or other macOS Mojave compatible file system format. Nevertheless, formatting also makes hard drive data inaccessible from macOS Mojave, and consequently, you lose those data.

Steps to Recover Lost Data

To recover lost data from your WD external hard drive, you need to deploy Stellar Data Recovery Professional for Mac on your MacBook running on macOS Mojave. This practical and efficient macOS Mojave compatible data recovery software provides an intuitive user interface to ease your recovery process.

The steps to recover your lost data from your WD external hard drive are as follows:

Step 1) Download the software on your Mac from Stellar’s official website.

Install the software on Macintosh HD. Now, connect your Western Digital external hard drive to your MacBook and launch the data recovery software, and from the main interface, select the type of files you want to recover and click Next;

Step 2) Choose your erased or unreadable WD external hard drive and toggle on Deep Scan.

Step 3) Click Scan, and once the scan is complete, preview the scanned files to verify

Step 4) Select the required data and click Recover. Specify the save location to another external storage drive with storage space more than or equal to your WD external drive space, and then click Save

Wd External Hard Drive Reviews

Video: External Drive Recovery on Mojave

This is how you can recover your data from your erased or un-mountable external WD hard drive on macOS Mojave. Free download this amazing software and bring your lost data back to life.

Safeguard Data via Backup

This data loss instance must have triggered your brain to back up your Mac data. Backup does not mean, which most people comprehend, to save data to an external drive without keeping a copy on the internal drive. Backup means if you lose one the other you can use to get back your data.

Therefore, if you saved your data to an external drive and you do not want the same data on your Mac, then you need to have yet another external drive to back up. This is the sole philosophy of backup. It is advisable to create the backup of backup for business-critical data and keep the redundant backup in an offsite location.

Conclusion

The blog showcased tried and tested methodology to recover your lost data from a WD external hard drive on macOS Mojave. Try Stellar Data Recovery Professional for Mac to recover lost data quickly. The software is great to handle all kind of logical data loss situation from any Mac storage device—internal or external—including WD drives.

HomeStorageExternal StorageHow to format external hard drive for Mac and PC?

Often switch between a Mac and PC? Want to use one USB flash storage device for both? The thing is that by default, these platforms use different file systems – discs are formatted differently. Windows uses NTFS, and Mac OS uses HFS, these file systems are not compatible with each other. However there is a simple solution – you can format the drive to FAT32 or exFAT that performs better than FAT32. In the resulut, your external hard drive will work just fine with Mac and Windows.

You can format your external hard drive from either the PC or Mac. Just keep in mind if you want to use your drive also for OS X’s Time Machine backups, we advise you to format your drive through Mac because there is an additional step to make drive compatible with “Time Machine Backups”. And you can only do this with exFAT as with FAT32 Mac OS X’s Time Machine backup won’t work.

FAT32 or exFAT?

You can format your external hard drive in both – exFAT and FAT32. They both will work just fine. Mac and PC can read and write on both. However, each of these filesystems has their own pros and cons. FAT32 has a maximum 4GB file size limit, but exFAT can work with files as large as 16EB, that’s more than you will ever need. If you have to work with large video clips, games or any other kind of massive files, FAT32 may not be the best choice. Many still choose FAT32 over exFAT despite its slower performance, as it’s also compatible with Linux Os and is supported on many gaming consoles.

Once you have done with formatting, your external hard drive will be able to write and read files from both a PC and Mac. The resulting FAT32 file system will be compatible with all versions of Mac OS X, and Windows including Windows 10 back to 95. This is one of the most widely recognized file system formats.

  • FAT32 – a file system normally used on USB disks
  • exFAT – a newer file system optimized for flash devices and has improved performance overFAT32
Why I can’t use NTFS on Mac?

The default file system for Windows is NTFS (New Technology File System). Macs that run Snow Leopard or Lion can read data from drives that are formatted as NTFS. However, they can’t write. To make your Mac compatible writing on NTFS you have to get and install a third-party driver. So in the end, it’s possible to make your NTFS external hard drive compatible with Mac. But we advise to just format it to “FAT” file system as it’s less time consuming and easier.

Wd external hard drive reviews

Windows 7 can’t read nor write files to external drives that are formatted as HFS. To do so you also have to install third-party software like Paragon HFS+ for Windows.

How to format an External Drive in Windows

1)Connect the drive to your Windows PC.

2) Open Disk Management.

Wd External Hard Drive

3) Right click on unallocated or any other disk partition and select “New Simple Volume

4) Choose your desired size

5) Assign your external hard drive with any letter.

6) Choose exFAT as the file system.

7) Follow the instructions and at the end click “Finish

How to Format an External Drive in OS X

1) Connect your external hard drive to the Mac.

Western Digital Support

2)Open Disk Utility. You can do this quickly by pressing CMD and the spacebar at the same time. Then type in “Disk Utility”.

3) Select the drive you want to format.

4) Click the Partition tab.

6)Change the Partition Layout from Current to 1 Partition.

7) Click Options, SelectMaster Boot Record, and click OK.

8)Name the hard drive with a name of your choice.

9)Click the Format drop-down menu.

10) Select exFAT or MS-DOS FAT(FAT32).

11) At last press Apply, then click onPartition.

Wd External Hard Drive Software For Mac

Hello.
WD My Book would be best for desktop, Seagate Backup Plus Slim would be one of the best portable hard drives. Both are all-around decent drives and will do fine for any backup, pictures included.
As for cross-platform encryption, if you intend to use the same drive on both Mac and Windows, the best option would be using a cross-platform compatible encryption tool, like VeraCrypt, while formatting the drive in exFAT to avoid compatibility issues. This is because Windows won’t recognize Mac’s native encryption and vice versa. VeraCrypt is well-renowned, so it should function well without any problems, just be prepared to learn how to use the tool. Try testing this setup with just a couple files before you perform entire backups.