how to format wd elements hard drive for pc permissions

Or, if you bought an external hard drive from Seagate, it should come with Paragon Driver to let you read and write data interchangeably on Windows and Mac without formatting the drive. You can use a third-party app to write to an NTFS disk on a Mac. As a consequence, you won’t be able to add, change, or delete files. On macOS, you can only read disks in this format, not write to them. Is your external hard drive showing up as “read only” on your Mac? This usually happens because the drive is formatted with Microsoft’s NTFS file format. Here’s a guide to macOS disk permissions to help you understand the technical concepts. This lets you set the permissions to Read & Write to yourself while keeping the read-only for other users. If this is a drive you formatted yourself, you can change the individual permissions in the box above. Then hit the Start button to begin formatting your hard drive.You won’t see this option if the external storage is used as a boot drive or a Time Machine backup drive. Quick Format – it’s suggested to leave this unticked if you’re not sure. Volume label – enter a name for your hard drive.

Here are the options you need to specify before you can format the drive:ĭrive – choose your external hard drive from this dropdown menu.Īllocation unit size – leave it to the default values.

Double-click on the downloaded file and the tool will launch.

Connect your external hard drive to your computer if it isn’t already.Head over to the FAT32Format website and download the tool to your computer.A great thing about this tool is that you don’t even need to install it on your computer – it just works straight out of the box. This method is ideal for those of you who don’t like running commands and prefer tools with a simple user interface. The FAT32Format utility has been around for a long time and it lets you quickly format any of your external hard drives to FAT32. Use FAT32Format To Format Your External Hard Drives In most cases, it should only take a few minutes but it also depends on how large your external hard drive is.

It’ll format the drive to FAT32 and let you know when it’s done.

How to format wd elements hard drive for pc permissions