#How to format external drive for mac how to#
#How to format external drive for mac for mac#
#How to format external drive for mac mac os x#
#How to format external drive for mac mac os#

Select the External drive or Flash Drive on the left that shows the capacity and not the Volume which appears indented below the drive.

Connect the External disk drive or Flash Drive and open Disk Utility.app from /Applications/Utilities/ folder.

#How to format external drive for mac for mac#

Format an External Disk or a Flash Drive for Mac using Disk Utility in OS X El Capitan and macOS Siera. You could either use Disk Utility or Terminal command to format it for Mac. Please be aware that formatting a drive will erase it completely, so make sure you have backed up any important data you want to keep in case you are not using a brand new external hard drive.There are two ways to format an external disk or a flash drive for Mac.

#How to format external drive for mac how to#

How to Format an External Disk or a Flash Drive for Mac?

#How to format external drive for mac mac os#

You must format the external disk or flash drive in Mac OS Extended ( Journaled) with GUID partition table, If you want to make it a bootable USB installer disk for OS X.

If you want to use the drive for Time Machine backup, it must be formatted in Mac OS Extended ( journaled).

If you want to create an encrypted drive for Mac, it should be formatted in Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

So if you wish to clean a hard drive for a fresh install of OS X you will need to format it under Mac OS Extended ( Journaled).

#How to format external drive for mac mac os x#

Mac OS X can only be installed on a hard drive formatted in Mac OS Extended ( Journaled), filesystem.Here are the following most common reasons why would you like to format an external disk or a flash drive for Mac under Mac OS Extended ( Journaled). There are a good number of reasons why you might want to format an external disk or a flash drive for full Mac compatibility. Why would you format an External Disk or a Flash Drive in Mac OS Extended (Journaled)? This will ensure full Mac compatibility of a new external hard drive or flash drive. So, If you wish to use the hard drive for Mac, you need to format the external media in Mac OS X native file system called “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” filesystem. A Mac can only read the NTFS formatted hard drive but can not write any data on to it until you install a third party apps like NTFS for Mac or NTFS-3G to enable write access to NTFS partition under Mac OS X. A new external hard drive or a USB flash drive that you just bought can be used with both Mac and PC, but not always straight out of the box because most of them (external hard drives or USB flash drive) are sold in NTFS format, which is fully compatible only with Windows. We’ll be back with new Howto Guide soon.Everyone these days has an external media like a flash drive or an external hard drive which they use to expand their storage space, or transfer files and folder between two computers or to keep some personal or confidential documents separate from the computer. We would really appreciate if you share this article. Again, please subscribe us for more such How to guides, tech updates and much more or like us/follow us on Twitter, facebook or Google+. We hope you liked this Howto guide, please let’s us know if you know any other workaround.

Watch this video to know how to format any Hard Disk drive for Mac, Windows or any other OS. We have also attached a video guide here. It has notable limitations, including difficulties with files of size larger than 4 GB.

Mac OS X supports this format for both reading and writing, as does Windows. However, it is still widely used as almost all Flash-based drives use this format. FAT32 is a legacy file system in the Windows world. Now you can use your external hard disk only with Mac systems or Mac OS. But what if we want to use the same hard disk drive on Mac, Windows or any other OS? Well, there are few workarounds like formatting HDD to MS-DOS, FAT32 or NTFS-3G.