4 TB External HD won't format in High Sierra

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13 points

4 TB External HD won't format in High Sierra

After backing up my Retina MacBook Pro 15 inch late 2013 using Carbon Copy Cloner, I installed High Sierra last night. Today I bought a new 4 TB Western Digital My Passport portable external HD. The box says it has to be reformatted to use it with Mac OS, so I wasn't surprised when it would not mount on the rMBP.

However, when I run Disk Utility on the drive, it will not format--keeps giving me message that there is not enough space on the drive--regardless of the format I try (Mac OS Journaled, MacOS Journaled Case-sensitive, even APFS. I tried partitioning it into two 2 TB partitions, but still no joy.

Disk

Apple TV, iOS 5.1, Home Sharing from iTunes 10.6

Posted on Sep 29, 2017 4:52 PM

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Answer 1

mpetrides Author

Level 1

13 points

Sep 29, 2017 5:59 PM in response to ttreen1950

Thanks. I tried did verify that it was a GUID partition map, although I was not able to get the second dropdown--the one for Scheme. How did you get that second dropdown to show up?

In any event, I finally gave up and dredged up my old 17 inch MBP (vintage 2009 or so, running Mac OS 10.9.5) and formatted the drive on that machine. Now it mounts just fine on the rMBP running High Sierra. And I was able to erase it without problem from a boot into High Sierra.

There's some nuance here that isn't working right in High Sierra when it comes to formatting hard drives not originally formatted for Mac. (Odd, because I was able to erase/reformat a flash drive that came PC formatted out of the box--FAT 32 I believe--using Disk Utility in High Sierra.)

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