Remove write protection from WD external hard drive To solve this issue, you can check out one or more solutions that will be demonstrated next. WD external hard drive format failure can occur due to virus infection, corrupted file system, write protection and so on. Can I fix WD external hard drive won’t format issue? Any advice will be appreciated!” Then, I tried Disk Management but only received “The format did not complete successfully”. But I only got “Windows was unable to complete the format” when I tried to format it from Windows Explorer. “Having a 1TB WD Passport external hard drive with RAW file system, I want to format it to exFAT for using in Mac and Windows computer. Unable to format WD Passport external hard drive