1. How Do You Format External Hard Drive For Macbook Pro
2. How Do You Format External Hard Drive For Mac Windows 10

1. Next, let's focus on how to change an NTFS Lacie external drive on Windows PC to FAT32. Follow the detailed steps below. Launch EaseUS Partition Master Free. Choose the Lacie external drive and right-click it, then select 'Format partition'.
2. To format the drive to work with both platforms you will need use a Windows computer to format the disk as exFAT. Update: At the time of the original posting in 2011, there were some problems getting a Mac formatted exFAT drive working with Windows, it had trouble recognizing those drives.

So, you just bought an external hard drive and wanted to use it on your Mac. But somehow, macOS doesn't allow you to write data to the drive. That's all because it's been initialized with Windows NT File System (NTFS), which is primarily for PCs.

How Do You Format External Hard Drive For Macbook Pro

It doesn’t matter if it's an internal or external, or if it’s a hard drive or an SSD. The formatting process will format the selected drive by creating a partition map, and apply an appropriate file system that your Mac can work with to the drive.

Apple Mac machines support a different file system. In this post, I'm going to show you how to format your external drive for a Mac compatible file system i.e. Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

Just follow this easy step-by-step guide and you're all set. Important note: If you have useful files stored on the external drive, be sure to copy or transfer them to another safe place prior to formatting.

The operation will erase all data and your files will be gone for good. You could use a recovery program like to retrieve them, but the odds of recovery vary. Pro tip: If your external drive has a large volume, like mine - a 2TB Seagate Expansion - I highly recommend you also create multiple partitions. I'll also show you how to do that below.

Most External Hard Drives Are Initiated with NTFS During the last several years, I've used several removable drives, including a 500GB WD My Passport, 32GB Lexar flash drive, and a few others. Three weeks ago, I bought a brand new to backup my MacBook Pro before I updated to the latest macOS, 10.13 High Sierra (also see I encountered).

When I connected the Seagate to my Mac, the drive icon showed up like this. What is NTFS? I'm not going to explain here; you can read more on. The problem is that on macOS, you can't work with files saved on an NTFS drive unless you use a paid app. How to Format an External Drive to Work with Mac (from NTFS to Mac OS Extended)? Note: The tutorial and screenshots below are based on macOS Sierra 10.12.5.

How Do You Format External Hard Drive For Mac Windows 10

They might be different if your Mac has a different version. Step 1: Open Disk Utility. The quickest way to do this is a simple Spotlight search (click the search icon on the upper right corner), or go to Applications Utilities Disk Utility. After clicking 'Partition', you'll see this window. Located on the left is a big blue circle with the name of your external drive together with its volume size. What you need to do next is click the add '+' button to increase the number of partitions on your external disk. Then allocate the desired volume to each partition.

You can do that by clicking the small white circle and dragging it around. After that, you can rename each partition and define a file system for it. Step 3: Confirm your operation.