WD My Passport Format Problem (High Sierra)

Try this:

Open Disk Utility (not in Recovery Mode) and change the View drop-down (upper left corner) to Show All Devices. Then select your actual device - not the indented volume - and then the Erase making sure the Partition Map Scheme is GUID and format is Mac OS Extended (Journaled). This should recreate your single volume as GUID/HFS+.

I had this problem with two WD My Passport drives bought for use as a Time Machine backups. What I had to do was use the WD utilty program to reformat the drive as HFS+. Once I did this I could rename it.

However, these drives have been unreliable. Time Machine backups fail on theM. You have to eject the drive, disconnect and recinne it. These drives don’t work properly with High Sierra.

Just had this same issue with My Passport. Was able to successfully reformat same drive on another Mac that wasn't running High Sierra. Not the most convenient way, but it works. Good luck.

I had this problem.

First unmounted the drive then with the device unmounted chose format and it worked.

Certainly do not need the Mac specific drive.

try booting into Recovery and use the Disk Utility there to reformat the external drive. I would not recommend APFS on the external HD, that will lead to problems.

Recovery http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718

Thank you for posting this. All the other tutorials I can find completely miss changing the view to select the device.

I'm shocked how hard it is to find this clearly stated in any explainer.

Thanks again.

Hi Keg,

If I do what you did would the data on my WD Passport Ultra be erased and will I lose all my files? I have so much work on my external HDD and I'm worried. This is how it shows up on disk utility:

I have the same problem and it seems to me that erasing would delete everything on the WD hard drive. I just had this happen to two hard drives and I have lots of material on two 4 TB HDD. Both were renamed by the system this week and both show two partitions, but I am afraid to change the partitions for fear of erasing everything. I have tried plugging the external drive into my laptop, but it doesn't make any difference.

Does anyone know what is causing this? More importantly, is there any way to recover the information on the drives.

I fear you are right. I bought a My Passport for Mac 1 TB yesterday, and foolishly agreed to password protection with encryption. They restored my MacOS at the Apple Store for a problem I was having, and now the WD drive is not recognizing my password, even though I wrote it down, and it matches my hint. *****. I tried it on another Mac, same thing.

very good, that worked at once and that's the way to go as it seems. Thank you

Thank you for this. It worked perfectly.

Many thanks, I was desperate all because I was selecting the title and not WD Elements.

Thanks ...worked for me !!

Thanks Keg this works!!

Thanks !!!!