I just purchased a 4TB WD Passport external drive and have downloaded everything correctly, followed the instructions and it won’t let me erase and reformat the drive. I am using a 2015 MacBook Pro with the latest update (Sierra) and have followed the instructions listed on the WD community for “how to reformat for exfat or fat32 and it still hasn’t worked.
When I go to erase it I rename it to “WD2017” and have it set to “exFat” and have tried both the “Master reboot” and Guid scheme”. Neither work and it comes up with the message "The disk is too large to be supported by the given partition scheme. Operation failed. " I’ve googled and can’t find another answer that works. I want to reformat to exfat because I work with both windows and mac for my clients.
I have contacted customer service but thought maybe I’d try here as well. Thank you!
Disk Utility does have limitations when it comes to hard drives with large storage capacity. You can first format the complete drive with HFS (4 TB) then come back and try partitioning your WD into ex-fat (2 TB). If it happens successfully then you will able to use 2 TB of your HD on Mac/Windows. Otherwise, you might require a 3rd party tool to get 4 TB formatted.
Additionally, try Terminal to format WD with ex-fat.
The easiest way to do this, is using command line(terminal).
- First find the disk: diskutil list
e.g
/dev/disk3 (external, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *X TB disk4
1: Microsoft Basic Data easystore X TB disk4s1 - Now earse
diskutil eraseDisk FILE_SYSTEM DISK_NAME DISK_IDENTIFIER
Replace FILE_SYSTEM, DISK_NAME,DISK_IDENTIFIER.
e.g diskutil eraseDisk ExFAT ABC /dev/disk4;
