Can NOT mount new Passport external drive.

I have a new Mac Air and a new Passport external drive. I can't get the new drive to be recognized in Time Machine. I'm going into deeper waters than I'm comfortable with. I suspect the problem to be that we moved all the data from my old Mac Pro to my new Air and that the time machine snapshots are blocking the new external drive somehow. I tried Terminal, "tmutil list localsnapshots" and it came up <mount_point> and no list at all. When I click on time machine, I can see maybe 10 snapshots. Advice needed. The OS is Ventura, up to date.

MacBook Air, macOS 13.5

Posted on Aug 19, 2023 9:45 AM

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Tesserax

Level 10

157,896 points

Posted on Aug 19, 2023 1:06 PM

You're almost there. Note in the screenshot you provided, your My Passport is already selected. Also note the line under My Passport stating Microsoft NTFS. That is telling us that this drive is currently formatted in NTFS.

What you need to do to change it to APFS, is select the "Erase" option. Be sure that only the My Passport is selected.

Then follow the steps in this Apple Support article erase & format this drive for APFS:

Erase and reformat a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support

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Can NOT mount new Passport external drive.

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