New External Hard Drive Setup Mac - The Disk You Attached is Not Readable By This Computer MacOS

New External Hard Drive Setup Mac - The Disk You Attached is Not Readable By This Computer MacOS
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I just got a new external hard drive for my Macbook and when I plug it in, it doesn't work. I've run into this before and in this short video I'll show you what to do to get a new external hard drive ready to use on your Mac. So if you see a warning that says the disk you attached was not readable by this computer, it doesn't necessarily mean the external hard drive is blank or defective.
One of the main reasons you see this message is because the drive was formatted for use on a PC which uses a different file format system than on the Mac. So I would eject this disk and plug it into a PC to check if there are files on the external drive first. If there are, then copy the files to another disk if you want to save them. That's because this new drive will have to be initialized. And this process will erase everything on the hard drive.
My external drive is brand new right out of the box so there's nothing on it. So I can click the Initialize button. On the next window, be sure to select the external drive in the left column. Mine is called SSK SSK Storage Media but yours will be different. To initialize my new external drive, I'll simply click on Erase.
On the popup window, I can rename the drive to something useful. Then in the Format dropdown menu, there's a couple of choices you'll have to make depending on what computers you'll use this drive on. If you are only working in a Mac environment and never on a PC then choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled). This format is only readable on a Mac. But for the most flexibility I like to use ExFAT. The ExFAT format will allow you to read and write to this drive on both a Mac and PC. And this is best for me because I often switch between a Mac and Windows computer.
Where it says Scheme leave this on GUID Partition Map. Because I'm using this for external storage, the GUID Partition Map is what should be selected. To finish the initialization process click on the Erase button. Doing this it will erase everything so only proceed if you are ok with losing everything on the external drive. After a few seconds, the formatting of my new drive is complete. And then I can click Done. If I Get Info on the drive I can see that it's formatted to ExFAT and has the full 4TB of space available. Now my drive is ready for use on either a Mac or PC.
And here's one more thing that might be helpful. If you want to avoid this process, you can find brand new drives that have been specifically formatted for Macs. But this is actually kinda rare. And a drive like this will only be able to be used on a Mac. To make it work on a Mac and PC, it'll have to be formatted exactly the way I explained earlier. So it's not necessarily advantageous to buy a drive specifically formatted for Mac use.
Lastly, I need to reemphasize that formatting the drive will erase everything so be sure there isn't any important data on the external drive before you start. If this video was helpful please give me a thumbs up and hit the subscribe button to stay up to date on all my weekly videos!
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