How to format hard drive for mac and pc use

For instructions on how to do this, please see the instructions below:. Return to Top. You may also wish to post on our Community Forums for assistance from other users of our products who may be able to assist you with your issue. Answer ID Western Digital cannot assist in acquiring or using third-party software to format a drive as FAT There are many different applications many of them free that can accomplish this. We recommend doing a search on Google or Bing by Microsoft for more information.

Another option is to ask on our Community Forums for community assistance in finding or using a FAT32 formatting application. The FAT32 formatter software is only for older external single drive units and can only format a drive that is 1TB and below. It will not work on an external drive that is greater than 1TB in size. It also may not work on models released after When run, this utility can only create a single FAT32 partition for the full capacity of the hard drive. In case the answer did not answer your question, you can always visit the WD Community for help from WD users.

Return to WDC. This allows the drive to be used on both Windows and macOS. Please select the Operating System OS in which the drive is to be formatted from the list above to display the instructions. For instructions on how to do this, please see the instructions below: Connect the WD drive to the Mac computer. Double left-click on the Mac HD , the internal Mac hard drive visible on the top-right corner of the desktop screen.

Choose Applications from the left-side panel.

From the Applications folder, open Utilities , and lastly double-click on Disk Utility. Disk Utility will now be open.

• How to Format a Drive for Mac & PC Compatibility?
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From the left-side pane, choose the drive that is to be re-formatted. Typically there are two listings for each drive unless more than one partition exists on a particular drive. Choose the drive listing that is farthest to the left Not indented for the drive to be formatted.

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4. Format a disk for Windows computers using Disk Utility on Mac?

It is usually directly above the name of the drive. Erase After selecting the appropriate drive, additional option buttons will become available on the top part of the Disk Utility window. Click on Erase. The Erase dialog window will now appear.

How to Share an External Hard Drive Between Mac and Windows | Digital Trends

Assign the name that will be given to the drive. Select the Format file system from the drop-down menu. For this article, we chose exFAT , see image below. Select the Scheme Partition Table Scheme from the drop-down menu. See image below.

Begin by connecting the WD drive to the Mac computer. Once the drive appears on the desktop, click on Go on the top tool bar. From the drop-down menu, click on Utilities. In Utilities , select and open Disk Utility. When Disk Utility opens, select the drive that is to be partitioned and formatted from the left-side panel. Typically there are two listings for each drive, unless there is more than one partition on a particular drive.

Formatting a Drive for Mac OS X & Windows PC Compatibility

Choose the drive listing that is farthest to the left for the drive that will be formatted. It is usually directly above the name of the drive, and is the drive selection that has the total size being displayed. Once selected, click on Partition on the right-side area. In the Partition area, click under Partition Layout and select 1 Partition. Then, click on Options. To the right, insert a name for the drive, and click on Format. From the drop-down, select ExFAT.

When done, click on Apply. A window will come up showing that formatting and partitioning the drive will erase all data that is on the drive. If there's no needed information within the drive, then click on Partition. If there is data on the drive that is needed or is not backed up, it will need to be copied to another location before proceeding. The drive is now formatting and a status bar will be seen at the bottom that says formatting the disk and gives the name of the drive, the format it is applying, and the name that was specified.

When it is done, this bar will go away and the drive should now be listed on the desktop. Right-click on Start , the Windows logo on the bottom-left of the screen, and click Disk Management. In the Disk Management window, the lower pane will display a list of available drives. Enter your email address below:. I may be wrong on that size tho. I wish there was a universal filesystem everyone could use natively without these trappings on each individual OS.

This is not possible because Microsoft and Apple work a lot to avoid Linux users being happy and doing everything more easily than they already do.

Partition the drive on a Mac

I have avoided exFat for the exact same reasons as noted by the posters above; extremely slow transfer rates. I use a mac between http: Or does this only play a role when trying to reformat the drive under Windows? I know that fails for sure if the drive is previously set to use a GUID partition table. FAT32 may be universal-ish, but MS left it behind for good reasons besides the file size limit.

Apple seemed to have no trouble reverse-engineering FAT compatibility or did they license it? Ars Technica was still saying it was coming to the Mac in a commercial implementation a year ago: However, all references to this feature have been silently removed. It must be Master Boot Record. No, why should an operating system support the file systems of other operating systems? There should be a file system which is designed for external media and supports large files and large volumes, just like all other modern file systems.

FAT was designed by Microsoft and is patented by Microsoft. Every who wants to use FAT has to pay Microsoft. They have to pay Microsoft to use FAT. Almost every device supports FAT. Every device just supports it. They should have introduced a completely new, open and completely independent file system which is designed for external devices and is free to use by everyone. Could Ext4 and coming newer versions be a perfect candidate for this? I always have to think of this particular XKCD comic when talking about this ; http: The reality is we all live in a world of mixed platforms, always have and probably always will.

The OS that has the widest support usually becomes the most popular. Although we know its limitation of 4gb file size only. So, after an hour research I am able to find three solutions for it: Create two partitions on your hard drive to use with each OS, separately. You can create,delete,format,resize boot camp partition,repartition without any data loss, can make bootable DVD by Stellar partition manager. I found this tool really easy to use and efficient. Wanted to copy a large video file so needed to use exFAT. I do not like encryption, how do i do it.

I have inherited three Macs. I was planning to use them but now I am convinced that Apple is interested in creating compatibility issues, worse that microsoft, so I am switching to Linux. And after the instructions, I tried to boot into Windows. And then I see that is says something like: Press Enter to try again. I have a 16gb SanDisk that I wanted to put a movie onto.

The movie was 8gb. It gave me errors and would not copy the file. Said format problem. So I reformatted to Apple journaled and had no more problems. But now, of course, a PC cannot read the flash drive. Name required. Mail will not be published required. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction without explicit permission is prohibited. Enter your email address below: Posted by: Irene Kisala says: April 22, at 6: Lehman bros lol says: April 22, at 7: Daniel Clark says: February 1, at 5: Joshua K says: April 23, at Karl says: February 9, at 8: Alberto says: April 22, at 9: PlayfullyEvil says: