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Mac os reformat external hard drive

There are a couple of things you should keep in mind, however.

How to format a USB drive on a Mac

The first is that when you format and disk, you will erase all the data currently on it. So if you need that data, make sure you copy it onto another disk before you start. Secondly, there are several formats to choose from, each with advantages and disadvantage. Use the guide above to help you decide which is right for you. Ivan Exploring latest tech trends. Apple obsessed.

CleanMyMac X. English English. If Disk Management shows the drive as Not Initialized , the drive will have to be initialized. For assistance initializing a hard drive, please see Answer ID If there is no partition and data on the drive, it will appear as Unallocated , with a black bar on top. Right-click the Unallocated space or the black bar, and click New Simple Volume. Click Next to proceed. Choose the volume size and click Next.

By default, the maximum disk space is already selected and it is recommended to leave it at the maximum disk space. Open Disk Management. In Windows 8 this can be achieved by moving the mouse to the bottom-left corner of the Desktop and right-clicking on top of the Start menu screen. Then, click Disk Management right below Storage.

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From the menu, click on Disk Management. FAT32 in macOS Once that's done, double left-click on the Mac HD , the internal Mac hard drive visible on the top-right corner of the desktop screen. While in there, open Utilities , and lastly double-click on Disk Utility When Disk Utility opens, all available drives will display on the left-side panel. From said list, select the drive that is to be partitioned and formatted from the left-side panel.

Once selected, click on Partition on the top area of the Disk Utility window. The Partition window will now appear. Next to Partition, assign the desired drive name for the device. This is the format that the drive will be formatted to. Now, click on Apply. Disk Utility will begin the formatting and repartitioning process.

Which format to choose?

This may take several minutes. It is usually directly above the name of the drive, and is the drive selection that has the total size of the drive being displayed.

FAT32 in Windows 10 and earlier Important: Western Digital provides the Acronis True Image WD Edition software that allows users of our internal hard drives to format their drives. Users of our external drives will need to find third-party software to accomplish this task. The file may need to be uncompressed using some type of uncompression or unzipping utility.

Check the box labeled I accept this License Agreement and click Next. Select the hard drive that is to be formatted and click on Start.


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All data on the target hard drive will be erased during this process. Please remove or backup any valuable data before performing this step. A pop-up message will appear warning that formatting the drive will erase all the data on the device. Click on Ok to continue.

Format a Mac's Drive Using Disk Utility (OS X El Capitan or Later)

The final popup will warn again that this will erase all the data on the drive. If this is the desired course of action, click on Yes.

How To Make Any External Hard Drive Mac Compatible

Please rate the helpfulness of this answer. Select your Language Language. Click the icon for your external hard drive in the sidebar on the left. Click the Erase tab along the top of the window. Enter a name for the external hard drive in the Name field.

How to Format a WD hard drive to exFAT or FAT32 File System | WD Support

Click the Erase button. Published Date: Fri May 06 Yes No. Character limit: