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External hard drive mac and windows format

The commercial solution, which will give you access to support and software updates, is Paragon NTFS. Option 2: Here's how:. Then, select your hard drive from the left sidebar. Now go to the Erase tab. Then, click Erase at the bottom to format the drive.

Please note that this will complete erase the drive. Any data you want to keep on that drive must be backed up elsewhere first. This is an open-source program, so use it at your own risk. Alternatively, you can opt for paid software like MacDrive instead. Option 3: Create two partitions on your hard drive to use with each OS, separately.

Partition the drive on Windows 10

This solution is a little different than the previous two because instead of having one hard drive that works with both machines, you're splitting your HD into two sections, each dedicated to a different OS. For example, if you have a 1TB hard drive, GB of storage can be used with your Windows computer, and will be dedicated to your Mac computer. You won't be able to write to the Mac side from your Windows computer, and vice versa, but it's a good solution for people who want all the advantages each format has to offer for its respective system.

Here's how to do it:. Step 1: Select the drive from the left sidebar, then click the Partition tab.


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Under Partition layout, select "2 Partitions. For example, you might want more storage for your Mac than you do for your PC.

How to Format External Hard Drive for Mac & Windows (MS-Dos or ExFat?)

Give your settings a final lookover and click Apply. Looking to share an external hard drive between a Mac and PC? The best way to do it is with a drive formatted as FAT Though this format has some limitations, it enjoys nearly universal support from active platforms, including Mac and Windows operating systems, and many gaming and Linux OSs. The chief drawbacks of FAT32 involve file and partition size limitations. FAT32 imposes a size limit of 4GB on single files.

How to Format a Drive for Mac & PC Compatibility

So if you work with bulky video clips, for example, adopting FAT32 may not be a good idea. Macs running Snow Leopard or Lion can read from drives formatted as NTFS, but they can't write to such drives unless you install a third-party driver or muck about in the Terminal. Set up your drive following the manufacturer's instructions. The drive should automatically mount on your Mac's desktop if the finder preferences are set to show external drives.

If the drive is not formatted, you may get a message saying that the drive is unreadable by Mac OS X and asking you whether you want to format it via Disk Utility. Mac OS X won't let you create a FAT32 partition larger than 2TB; so if your drive is larger than that, you'll need to divide the available drive capacity into multiple partitions. To create a new partition, click the drive in the list on the left side of the Disk Utility menu.

Formatting From a Mac

Subscribe to the OSXDaily newsletter to get more of our great Apple tips, tricks, and important news delivered to your inbox! 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. 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?


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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?

How to Share an External Drive Between a Mac and a PC

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.

Formatting From a PC

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.

How to share an external hard drive between Mac and Windows

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.