

- #How to format external hard drive for mac how to#
- #How to format external hard drive for mac for mac os#
- #How to format external hard drive for mac mac os x#

Find the name of the drive in the left side of the Utilities window and select it. The Disk Utility application is located in the Utilities sub-folder. Start the Disk Utility, which is located under Applications > Utilities. Connect the external drive or the USB drive to the Mac. Disk utility - the MacOS utility application can help you with this.
#How to format external hard drive for mac for mac os#
Tuxera (who develop one of the commercial NTFS drivers for Mac OS X) have a list of free NTFS drivers that are developed from the same NTFS-3G source used by Linux to read NTFS drives. All is set, then you can go ahead to format the drive on your Mac. For a while I've been using but as far as I can tell it hasn't been updated since December 2008. You can also press Command+Space to open Spotlight search and use it to search for disk utility to open it. You can go to Finder > Application > Utilities > Disk Utility to open it.

Connect the external hard drive to your Mac via a USB cable.
#How to format external hard drive for mac how to#
In the pop-up window, you can set the file system and cluster size and then click OK. Now, we will show you how to format an external hard drive via Disk Utility: 1. Hi, It appears that you have formatted your external hard drive in Mac OS Extended format, which is not supported in Windows. Go to This PC > Manage > Disk Management, right-click the disk partition you need to format, and then choose Format. The instructions below are for Windows 10, but other versions of Windows from Windows 7 and up can also format an external drive as exFAT for use with Mac as well. Select Erase and then type in a name for the external hard drive. Click on the name of the external drive in the left panel of the Disk Utility. I'd love for someone to tell me differently. Reformat and Partition Seagate External Hard Drive. To format an external hard drive on your Mac, you need to complete the following steps: Start the computer and plug in the external HDD.
#How to format external hard drive for mac mac os x#
There are a few third-party products that allow Mac OS X to read NTFS formatted drives but as far as I'm aware the free ones aren't as well maintained as the commercial ones. Mac OS X has had support for reading NTFS formatted disk for a few versions, but still doesn't have write support. Click the Go menu, select Utilities from the drop-down menu, and open Disk Utility. The default GUID partitioning scheme won't be recognised by 32-bit Windows XP and earlier Windows operating systems and Mac OS X versions earlier than 10.4. To reformat your drive for macOS: Plug in the drive and open the Finder. FAT32 (called MS-DOS (FAT) by Disk Utility a filesystem originally released in 1977 and updated a few times since, lastly in 1996) really is the only cross platform filesystem that is going to work fully out of the box with Windows and Mac OS X.īe careful though, if you are using Disk Utility to format the drive, you should make sure to choose the Master Boot Record partitioning scheme (hit the "Options." button below the "Partition Layout" control on the Partition pane).
