format wd passport for mac couldnt unmount disk

Enter a name of your choice for the drive. Choose the Erase tab and select Mac OS Extended (Journaled) from the Volume Format drop-down menu.

Open Disk Utility on your Mac and select your external drive on the list to the left.Reformatting will erase everything on it. Temporarily back up any existing files on the drive to another location.The best advice, however, is simply to reformat your external drive to Mac OS X’s native file system, HFS+. This means your single 6GB zip file is now 6GB worth of separate files & folders. If the large file(s) you’re trying to copy are archives or images (zip, rar, dmg) you can extract all of the smaller files inside into a folder and copy them that way. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s look at how you can get around it. So while your drive might be 160GB in total, no single file can be larger than 4GB with FAT32. The cause is FAT32’s 4GB limit on individual file sizes. For example, copying large files to an external drive in Mac OS X might lead to the following Finder error: “The operation can’t be completed because an unexpected error occurred (error code 0).”īefore cursing your Mac, it’s important to note this is an issue with FAT32 that Linux and Windows users experience as well. Unfortunately, as technology progresses and the horribly outdated FAT32 file system continues to be used, issues will arise more often. NTFS drives, on the other hand, can only be read (but not written to) by non-Windows systems. still use FAT is because of its cross-platform compatibility with Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows. The reason removable media like flash drives, memory cards, etc. This is a Windows file system that rose to prominence in the 1990s before NTFS took its place in Windows systems of the early 2000s. Most external hard drives and USB flash drives, unless they are specifically marketed as Mac products, are formatted with the FAT or FAT32 file system. “The operation can’t be completed because an unexpected error occurred (error code 0).” If you received this message when copying files from your Mac to an external hard drive or USB flash drive, there is a simple explanation.

Format wd passport for mac couldnt unmount disk