Format External Hard Drive For Mac And Windows

According to a recent survey, people are more likely to use external hard drive to expand storage space for their digital devices, compared to other storage media. However, hard drives advertised as being compatible with Windows and MacOS may have misled you into thinking you can use a hard drive cross-platform.

Formatting external hard drive is a useful skill if you have one. Be default, external hard drives are sold in NTFS, which is designed for Windows. To use it on a Mac computer, you have to format it to HFS or FAT32. We will tell you how to perform external hard drive format quickly.

Oct 25, 2018  I know Mac operating system doesn’t fully supports NTFS formatted drive. But if I format the Seagate external hard drive to HFS+ file system, it will not supported by my Windows computer. I want to know that what I should format the Seagate external hard drive to, so that it can be compatible both with Mac and PC. Is there any advice? Format USB or external hard drive for Mac using Mac disk utility Format USB or external hard drive for Mac on Windows PC using third-party USB format tool. Now, you can follow these two solutions to format any hard drive, flash drive, USB drive, SSD or any other external storage drive so as to make them work on your Mac now. However there is a simple solution – you can format the drive to FAT32 or exFAT that performs better than FAT32. In the resulut, your external hard drive will work just fine with Mac and Windows. You can format your external hard drive from either the PC or Mac. Use 'Disk Utility' to format External Drive with exFAT mode and GUID Partition Map to make the HDD compatible with both Windows & mac OS. Laptop: Macbook Air. If you’re lucky, you can just right-click each partition on the Mac drive and select Delete Volume to remove the partitions. You can then right-click in the empty space and select New Simple Volume to create a partition and format it with the Windows NTFS or FAT32 file systems. The Mac drive may have an “EFI System Partition” on it.

Rename your external hard drive- After clicking on “Format” select the format ” MAC OS Extended Journaled ”- After performing these steps, click ” Clear ” and wait for your computer to format the hard drive. Format my hard disk for MAC and Windows. To format a hard drive for compatibility of both Mac and windows you can use FAT32 format which has both read/write capability on win/Mac respectively. Although we know its limitation of 4gb file size only. Means if one want to transfer movie or any stuff greater than 4gb it can’t be done in this format.

Part 1: Format External Drive on PC

Format hard drive will erase all data in it, and you should backup it before formatting it.

Bear in mind that formatting an external hard drive will erase all your data, so you’d better back up them before the procedure. Then follow the easy steps below to format your external hard drive. It is available to Windows 10/8/7/XP/Vista.

Step 1. Connect your external hard drive to your PC via a USB cable.

Step 2. Click the Start menu and open Control Panel from the context menu. Select System and Security > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management.

Step 3. Here you can manage all your hard drives including the hard drive. Right-click on the external hard drive and select Format to trigger the Format dialog.

Step 4. Enter a name for the hard drive in the Volume label box. Then select a proper file system from the File system dropdown list. To use the external hard drive on Windows, select NTFS. FAT32 is compatible with both Windows and Mac.

Mac

Step 5. Choose Default from the Allocation unite size option. Next, uncheck the box next to Perform a quick format. That will perform a standard format, which will check errors and overwrite them on each sector.

Step 6. Click the OK button. When prompted, hit OK to start formatting the external hard drive immediately.

For your external storage device like SD card, the steps work similarly, and you just need to insert your SD card into reader and plug it into your computer.

Part 2: Format External Drive on Mac

Similar to Windows, Apple has introduced the hard-drive-format feature into MacOS, but the procedure is pretty different.

Note: Again, do not forget to backup your Mac before formatting it.

Step 1. Also plug the external hard drive to your computer with a USB cable.

Step 2. Open your Disk Utility. You can find it in Applications > Utilities.

Step 3. Find the external hard drive on the left sidebar and click on it.

Format External Hard Drive For Mac And Pc Windows 10

Step 4. Go to the Erase tab from the top of the window.

Step 5. Next, select Mac OS Extended (Journaled) from the Format dropdown list. Drop a name into the Name field.

Step 6. Click the Erase button at the bottom right side. Then read the popup message carefully and hit Erase again to initiate formatting external hard drive.

Part 3: How to Recover Data from a Formatted External Drive

As mentioned previously, formatting external hard drive will overwrite all your data. In fact, chances are that you can recover data from the formatted drive before it is overwritten. Apeaksoft Data Recovery could meet your need of data recovery.

  • Retrieve lost data from formatted external hard drive simply.
  • Support a lot of data types including photos, videos, documents, etc.
  • Integrate both quick scan and deep scan to meet various demand.
  • Restore lost data to your computer with the original conditions.
Download for WinDownload for Mac

In short, it is the best way to recover lost files from your external hard drive after formatting. We use photos as the example to tell you the procedure.

How to Recover Data from A Formatted External Hard Drive

Step 1. Get the best data recovery software Format seagate backup plus for mac time machine.

Download and install Data Recovery on your computer.

Launch it when you need to recover data from a formatted external hard drive. Use a USB cable to connect the external hard drive and your PC.

Step 2. Preview all lost photos

Format External Hard Drive For Mac And Windows Use

Check the box next to the data type you want to recover, such as Image. Then select your external drive under the Removable Drives area. Click the Scan button to look for lost data. When it is done, preview the photos and select the desired ones. The search bar on the top of the window is used to quickly locate certain images. If you cannot find your photos, click the Deep Scan button to scan your disk deeply.

Format External Hard Drive For Mac And Pc Without Losing Data

Step 3. Recover photos from formatted external hard drive

Format External Hard Drive For Mac And Windows Version

Drive

After selection, click the Recover button to trigger the data recovery process. It only takes a few minutes to recover entire external drive.

Format External Hard Drive For Mac And Windows 6

Conclusion

Format External Hard Drive For Mac And Windows Download

This post has told you how to format external hard drive on Windows and MacOS. Microsoft and Apple have designed the format feature into their operating systems. What you need to do is to follow our guide. On the other hand, Apeaksoft Data Recovery is able to restore lost files from your formatted external hard drive. Now, you can feel free to erase your drive.