My mac wont let me reformat a new My Passport WD disc drive. Each time it comes up as failed. Thus, I was thinking reformatting the drive might purge all the old backups I no longer want and renew the 500 GB of space. The current formatting is OS Extended for Mac and I use a 2008 Macbook Pro Aluminum. Best portable external hard drive for mac. Also, I cannot find a WD application anywhere on my computer. So, my questions.

Western Digital external hard drives are useful for storing and backing up files. However, you may have run into a problem trying to use your Western Digital hard drive with multiple operating systems. This is because you must format the drive with a specific file system before using it with a computer, and Windows and Mac computers run on different file systems. The only solution to making your hard drive compatible with a different operating system is to reformat the drive. This, however, erases all of the data on the drive.