Erase and Format External Hard Drive on Mac. In this post, let’s talk about how to erase and format external hard drives on Mac and Windows. Seagate branded external drives come preformatted, some for PCs, some for Macs, and some of them have special utilities.Connect the drive to the Mac. Quickly Format an External Hard Drive for Mac and Windows PCIf you buy an external drive—such as one of our recommended desktop hard drives, portable hard drives, or USB 3.0 flash drives—you may need to reformat it to work with your operating system of choice, since different operating systems use different file systems to process data.How to format an external drive on macOS with exFAT. In comparison, exFAT is more compatible. If you want to use the external hard drive on both Windows and Mac, you can choose to use one of these two file systems.
![]() ![]() ![]() Formatting External Hard Drives And Windows Mac And WindowsIt’s possible, but tricky, to change the size of a partition later on in Windows and macOS we recommend backing up the data on your drive before attempting the task, since it’s possible to wipe your drive doing this.Now that you’ve figured out those differences, it’s time to reformat your hard drive. Make sure to leave plenty of room for future backups on both partitions. Now your computer will see your single drive as multiple, smaller drives. First, partition the drive using Disk Utility with macOS, and (using our walkthrough below) format one part as HFS+ and the other as FAT32 then, plug the drive into Windows and reformat the FAT32 portion as NTFS. If you want to use a single external hard drive to back up both File History and Time Machine, you can partition it so that some of the drive is NTFS and some is HFS+. Microsoft office 2011 for mac trial downloadIf you already have data stored on the drive, back that data up elsewhere, reformat the drive, and then put your data back on the drive.
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