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Reformat pc external hard drive for mac

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.

How to Erase and Format a Hard Drive

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. 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. It is usually directly above the name of the drive.

Partition the drive on Windows 10

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. 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.


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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. 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.

The best ways to format an external drive for Windows and Mac

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. It can universally work with all versions of macOS and Windows, including a majority of recent and recently obsolete operating systems. So FAT32 is suitable when we want to store files of relatively small sizes and the drive doesn't have a large capacity. Otherwise, FAT32 is not the best choice for us.

How to share an external hard drive between Mac and Windows

The largest partition and file sizes it supportted are nearly unlimited by today's standards. It is not compatible with older operating systems. We must have macOS As most users have upgraded operating system, it is actually quite easy to meet to lowest operating system requirements of exFAT.


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So read-only can't be a reason for us to give up using NTFS, especially when we have high requirements on transfer speed and performance of drives. On Windows computer, we can follow the steps below to format an external hard drive for both Mac and PC. Select the external hard drive from the list and right-click on it. Choose Format from the contextual menu.

When we are using Mac, we can use the method below to make our external hard drive be compatible with both macOS and Windows. 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: April 22, at Argo says: Kilian says: April 23, at 1: Ricardo says: April 23, at 7: Paul says: Theo Vosse says: April 23, at 2: April 23, at 3: April 23, at 6: Makka says: April 23, at 8: April 23, at 9: Kavi Ugl says: April 24, at Prk says: April 25, at 6: April 26, at Curtis says: July 9, at 1: Benzamin watson says: August 9, at 3: November 20, at Joe says: