How you format a mac hard drive is entirely dependent on what kind of drive you plan on formatting. To format external hard drive on mac, all you have to do is plugin your hard drive and launch disk utility. To share a usb drive between a mac and a windows pc, there are two disk formats to choose from. This is a simple procedure and is achieved the same way for all drive types and through. Tesla dashcam flash drive formatting and setup on a mac. You can resolve the problem by formatting the hard drive or usb in exfat file system, which is compatible in both windows and. If you are a mac user, here is an overview of different file system systems and how to choose the format to use for the usb drive to ensure compatibility with other operating systems.
This situation is common with many of us that we will have multiple drives without compatibility in using across systems. Locate the drive name from the left hand side of disk utility and click on it. Click the erase button or tab, then complete these fields. Again, formatting a drive will erase it completely, so make sure you have everything backed up that you want to keep. How to format an external hard drive with pictures wikihow. In this post, youll learn how to format an external drive to a mac compatible file system and recover files from a reformatted hard drive. Whether you want to format a flash drive on your mac or convert a usb hard drive to use as a media player, disk utility makes it easy. Launch disk utility, located in applications utilities. Heres how to format a drive if you are planning to use it with a mac. Read this usb drive data recovery guide for more information. Open finder and choose applications utilities disk utility to launch.
For instance, is the hard drive internal or external. This wikihow teaches you how to change an external usb hard drives format on windows and mac computers. Formatting a hard drive can change the file system to make it compatible with your computers operating system, as well as fix any nonphysical errors on the drive itself. Formatting your drive will wipe out all the data in it.
The first part is for mac users, and the second part is for pc users windows 10 based. Heres how to format a drive using a mac including how to format a drive for windows and mac so the contents can be read on both platforms, and what format to use for time machine. If you are trying to format mac external hard drive, you can go over the process step by step. Be aware that formatting a hard drive erases the drives contents in the process. The other formats microsofts ntfs and apples mac os extended dont work well on the other operating system. Format an external hard drive or usb flash drive for mac os x. Before we recycle, lend, sell or abandon a usb flash drive, we should remove all the personal data on the usb flash drive. Due to the smallest userbased percentage worldwide, mac os x users are the ones who might run into these file format problems. Since formatting an external hard drive will erase all of its files if you wish to save them you must back them up copy. How to format a drive on a mac if you want to use a different file system on your usb drive, youll need to format it. To format your external drive hard drive in windows which works with both platforms, first plugin your drive with windows machine. How to format external hard drives on a mac sweetwater. We do have another 1tb hard disk formatted with ntfs in windows, which cannot be used with mac.
Choose either apfs or mac os extended journaled to format as a mac volume. Tesla dashcam flash drive formatting and setup on a mac pure tesla. Compare the different options for formatting an external hard drive to work with. How to format external hard drive to use on mac and pc. How to format or partition an external hard drive for mac.
How to format an external drive for mac compatibility. Watch this before buying a usb drive for your tesla. How to format an external drive for mac from ntfs to mac os extended. The main reason for formatting a usb drive as fat32 on a mac is that you want to be able to use the drive on a windows pc, as well as a mac perhaps to. Also, since i dont know whether you are on a pc or mac to perform this operation, im here to break down this guide into two parts. You can get to know how to reformat wd hard drive for mac and pc from this post, if you need to use a western digital external hard drive, like wd elements both under mac and pc. Once you open the disk utility app, you can see all the. The below steps for formatting external drive is for windows 10 and also works the same with an old version of windows.
The tutorial and screenshots below are based on macos sierra. The best ways to format an external drive for windows and mac. Formatting a hard drive can change the file system to make it. For most reasons to erase, you should erase the disk, which also erases all volumes on that disk.
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