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Are you looking for a How to Format Hard Drive For Mac and Windows? If you want to copy and move files between two different computer systems, you need to find a compatible file system format. You might already know what happens when a hard drive is formatted. It will delete all the information on it at once, making it empty.
So, before you format your Mac or PC drive, make sure you have a copy of all your important files. After that, you can format your hard drive for Mac or PC to get the following benefits. By default, most USB formats are NTFS, while most Mac formats are APFS. Next, let’s look at what file formats work on both Mac and PC.
Steps to Format Hard Drive For Mac
- Connect the drive to the Mac.
- Open Disk Utility. The easiest way to do that is hit CMD and the spacebar at the same time and type in “Disk Utility” to find the program.
- Select the drive you want to format.
- Click Erase.
- Give the drive a descriptive name and leave the default settings: OS X Extended format and GUID partition map. These will format the drive in OS X’s HFS+ filetype so it will be compatible with Time Machine.
- Click Erase and OS X will format the drive.
- With the drive selected in Disk Utility, click Partition.
- Enter the amount of space you want to set aside for Time Machine. In this example, we’re shrinking the Time Machine partition to 128GB instead of allowing Time Machine to take up the whole drive.
- Click Apply.
- Select the new untitled partition so we can format it as exFAT for use with both Mac and Windows.
- Click Erase.
- Give the partition a name and select exFAT for the format.
- Click Erase to finish.
Format Hard Drive For Windows
- Connect the drive to your Windows PC.
- Open the Disk Management tool. You can do that by typing “disk format” or “disk management” in Windows search or going to Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Create and format hard disk partitions.
- Right-click on the external drive’s partition or unallocated space you want to format and choose New Simple Volume
- Follow the wizard to choose a volume size.
- Coose exFAT as the file system in the Format Partition screen.
- Give the volume a new name
- Click Next
- Click Finish.
you can visit Microsoft support center for further help.
Why Should We Format Hard Drives?
- It will help you get rid of sensitive information on your hard drive so that the other user can’t get to it.
- If you don’t have much room left. Formatting the disc makes it easy to store new data.
- Let’s say a virus has messed up the hard drive. In that case, you can completely format it to remove the malware.
- By formatting a partition, you can organise the storage on your Mac and PC and combine the free space with another partition.
- When you format the disc, the wasted space on the storage section will be put back together.
- Any problem with your hard drive can also be fixed by formatting it.
- More importantly, formatting the disc will let you change the file system and make it work with both Mac and PC.
FAQ
Can you format a hard drive for both Windows and Mac?
In just a few easy steps, you can format drives that work on both Mac and PC. Right-click the USB or external drive you want to format, and then click “Format.” Set the label for the partition, the file system (NTFS/FAT32/EXT2/EXT3/EXT4/exFAT), and the size of the clusters, then click “OK.”
Is exFAT compatible with Mac and Windows?
exFAT is a lightweight file system that works with all versions of Windows and all modern versions of macOS. Format your drive in exFAT if you want to use it with both PCs and Macs.