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Format external hard drive for mac with windows how to#
Format external hard drive for mac with windows mac os x#
Format external hard drive for mac with windows Pc#
Format external hard drive for mac with windows windows#

If your Mac still refuses to recognise it, you can tell it to initialise the drive as an MS-DOS disk (ie FAT32). You should then be able to copy files to it with your Mac. However, if both of you want to read and write to this particular EHD, I suggest reformatting it in exFAT while it’s still empty. If he right-clicks on the 4TB drive and selects Properties from the drop-down menu, the Properties sheet will have an entry for “File System” that will usually be NTFS or FAT32. All the PC’s drives will be shown in the right-hand pane.

Format external hard drive for mac with windows windows#

Your dad can check the format of his 4TB EHD by running Windows Explorer and selecting Computer in the left-hand pane.

Format external hard drive for mac with windows mac os x#

Apple added read-only support for NTFS in 2003 with Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) and many Mac users need it for running Windows under Boot Camp.

Format external hard drive for mac with windows Pc#

Mac to PC file transfer using an ethernet cableĮven if the 4TB drive has been formatted in Windows’ NTFS (New Technology File System) format, then your Mac should still be able to read it, though it won’t be able to write to it. Apple already supported FAT32 and it added support for exFAT in Mac OS X 10.6.5 (Snow Leopard) and later versions of OS X. All updated versions of Windows XP and later versions of Windows support both FAT32 and exFAT. If your dad’s new 4TB EHD (external hard drive) has been formatted in FAT32 or exFAT, then both his PC and your Mac should be able to read it. Hard drives will have to double in size another seven times to reach that.

In theory, this can handle drives up to 64 zettabytes, though 512TB is the recommended maximum. However, hard drives keep getting bigger - now they are typically 500GB to 4TB - and in 2006, Microsoft released a new extended version, exFAT. In 1996, Microsoft introduced FAT32 to handle much larger hard drives, and FAT32 is still in common use. When DOS was born, popular hard drives only had 5MB or 10MB of storage space, which you could fill today with a single animated GIF. Most operating systems can read files in these old formats. They tend to use a version of Microsoft’s FAT file format, which dates back to the MS DOS (or IBM PC DOS) operating system used by the IBM PC in 1981. Macs and Windows machines do have their own preferred file formats for internal hard drives, but external hard drives don’t always ship with these pre-installed. The hard drives should not be a problem, unless your computers are very old. However, my Mac doesn’t recognise his hard drive, and his PC won’t recognise my hard drive. I bought a 4TB hard drive for my dad, and thought it would be easy to copy the files over so he could use them on his PC.

Do not remove or try to access the drive until it says the process is complete.I have a Mac and an external hard drive that includes some important family files.

You will be given a status bar to show the progress of the format.

Once you have picked your desired formatting options, select Erase.

The benefit of this is that the drive is overwritten multiple times, which makes it hard to recover the files that were previously saved there. If you change the option to most secure then the format will take much longer (up to several hours) depending on the size of the drive. This quickly formats the drive and is the best option for most users. By default, security options are sent to fastest.

Security Options allow you to change how you'd like the format to be done.

Name refers to the name of this drive which can be changed as desired.Ĭlick here to learn more about file system options.

You will be given options of how you would like the drive formatted.In the Disk Utility window, select the drive you'd like to erase then click Erase.Using the Spotlight Search search for "Disk Utility" and click to open Disk Utility.Do not unplug or attempt to access the drive until Windows gives you a Format Complete message. Once your options are set, click Start.Most users do not have a reason to run a long format but there is the option to do so. Format options refers to if you'd like a Quick Format.Ī quick format will run the format as quickly as possible.ĭeselecting quick format will make the format run much slower (up to several hours for a large drive) but it does so because it is overwriting the previous data.The volume label is the name of your drive.

The important options are: File System, Volume Label, and Format Options.Ĭlick here to learn more about file system options. Open the File Explorer and navigate to the drive you would like to format.

Format external hard drive for mac with windows how to#

How to reformat external hard drives or flash drives for Windows and Mac