So, you just bought an external hard drive or a portable SSD 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. Apple Mac machines support a different file system.
- The Best External Hard Drives for Mac in 2019. If you really fancy a drive formatted for Windows (which will usually come preformatted in the NTFS format), you can use the Disk Utility in.
- Windows PC and Mac use different filesystems. The Windows uses NTFS and Mac uses HFS. They are incompatible with each other. So, if you want to use an external hard drive on both Windows and Mac, you need to format it to a filesystem that is compatible with Windows PC and Mac.
- A hard drive can be used on any type of computer - PC or Mac. But in order for the computer and drive to talk to one another, the drive has to be formatted. This article explains. Seagate branded external drives come preformatted, some for PCs, some for Macs, and some of them have special utilities.
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.
How to Convert a Mac-Formatted Drive to a Windows Drive Chris Hoffman @chrisbhoffman Updated July 10, 2017, 10:23pm EDT Macs format drives with Apple’s HFS+ file system, which Windows won’t recognize or access without third-party software.
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 Data Rescue 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 2TB Seagate Expansion to backup my MacBook Pro before I updated to the latest macOS, 10.13 High Sierra (also see those High Sierra issues I encountered).
When I connected the Seagate to my Mac, the drive icon showed up like this.
When I opened it, the default content was all there. Since I wanted to use it on Mac, I clicked the blue logo with the text “Start_Here-Mac”.
It brought me to a webpage on Seagate’s site, where it clearly indicated the drive was initially set up to work with a Windows PC. If I wanted to use it with Mac OS or Time Machine backup (which is my intent), I’ll need to format the drive for my Mac.
I then right-clicked the external drive icon on Mac desktop > Get Info. It showed this format:
Format: Windows NT File System (NTFS)
What is NTFS? I’m not going to explain here; you can read more on Wikipedia. The problem is that on macOS, you can’t work with files saved on an NTFS drive unless you use a paid app Paragon NTFS for Mac.
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. 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.
Step 2: Highlight your external drive and click “Erase”.
Make sure your drive is connected. It should show up on the left panel under “External”. Select that disk and click the “Erase” button, the one highlighted in red in the screenshot below.
Step 3: Select “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” in Format.
A new window will pop up asking which file system you’d like to format the external drive to. By default, it’s the Windows NT File System (NTFS). Select the one shown below.
Pro tip: If you want to use the external drive for both Mac and PC, you can also select “ExFAT”. Learn more about the differences between these file systems from this thread.
By the way, you can also rename your external drive.
Step 4: Wait until the erasing process is complete.
For me, it took less than a minute to format my 2TB Seagate Expansion.
You can also check to see if the format was successful. Right-click on the icon for your external drive on Mac desktop, then select “Get Info”. Under “Format”, you should see text like this:
Congratulations! Now your external drive has been formatted to be fully compatible with Apple MacOS, and you can edit, read, and write files to it as you want.
How to Partition an External Hard Drive on Mac
If you want to create multiple partitions on your external hard drive (in fact, you should for better file organization), here’s a step-by-step guide:
Step 1: Highlight your drive and click “Partition” in Disk Utility.
Open the Disk Utility app and highlight your external hard drive. Make sure you select the disk icon right under “External”. If you select the one below it, the Partition option will be greyed out and become unclickable.
Step 2: Add partitions and allocate volume for each one.
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.
Once you hit “Apply”, a new window pops up asking for your confirmation. Take a few seconds to read the text description to make sure it reflects what you intend to do, then click the “Partition” button to continue.
Step 4: Wait until it says “Operation successful.”
To check whether the operation is really successful, go to your Mac desktop. You should see multiple disk icons show up. I chose to create two partitions on my Seagate Expansion — one for backup, the other for personal use. You can find more info in this post: How to Backup Mac to an External Hard Drive.
That wraps up this tutorial article. I hope you find it helpful. As always, let me know if you have any issues during the formatting or partitioning process.
Summary :
Want to format an external hard drive for Mac and Windows PC? Do you know how to do this work easily? This post will show you specific methods to make external hard drive compatible with Mac and PC, which are easy and safe to complete.
Quick Navigation :
As we know, external hard drives are widely used to backup data or interchange files among different computers. Well, is there an external hard drive that could be shared between Mac and Windows PC? Of course, there is. Actually, most external hard disks could be compatible with Mac and PC as long as you format them correctly.
Why Need to Format External Hard Drive for Mac and PC
To put it simply, if you want to share external hard drive between Mac and PC, you need to format an external hard drive for Mac and PC.
Currently, hard drives for Windows PC are always formatted with NTFS, while hard disks for Mac are formatted with HFS+. However, when we connect a NTFS formatted disk to Mac, Mac OS X doesn't allow us to write files to the drive neither edit files, though it can read a NTFS drive. Similarly, Windows OS will ask us to format the HFS+ formatted drive when we connecting such a disk, let along edit files saved on HFS+ formatted hard disks unless we resort to third party programs.
But luckily, there are file systems well supported by both Mac and Windows PC, and they are FAT32 (it might be called MS-DOS on Mac) and exFAT. As long as we format the external hard drive to one of these 2 file systems, it can be shared between Mac and Windows.
Further Reading
Both FAT32 and exFAT have advantages and disadvantages.
FAT32: FAT32 works with all versions of Windows, Mac OS, Linux, game consoles, etc.
Format External Hard Drive For Mac And Pc 2018
However, single files on a FAT32 drive can't be larger than 4GB. If your external drive saves files larger than 4GB or you plan to save larger files to this drive, converting to FAT32 is not recommended.
In addition, a FAT32 partition must be not more than 32GB if you create it in Windows Disk Management. Of course, there is free partition manager that can help create a FAT32 volume up to 2TB, which also functions correctly.
exFAT: exFAT has very large file size and partition size limits, which means it's a good idea to format your external hard drive to exFAT.
Nevertheless, a lot of users complained that exFAT is slow, and they highly suggest using FAT32 if you can avoid file size constraints.
Three Options for Accessing NTFS Drives on Mac
Paid Third-Party Drivers
Some paid third-party NTFS drivers for Mac can be used to access NTFS drives on Mac. They work well and they have better performance than the free solutions which will be mentioned in the following part. Paragon NTFS for Mac is such a driver.
Besides, you can also use the paid third-party file system converters to convert NTFS to FAT32 or exFAT which are compatible with both Mac and PC. MiniTool Partition Wizard is one representative.
Free Third-Party Drivers
FUSE for macOS is a free and open-source NTFS driver that can enable write support. But, this solution is slower relatively. And the automatically mounting NTFS partitions in read-write mode can be a security risk for your Mac computer.
Apple’s Experimental NTFS-Write Support
The Mac OS has an experimental support for writing to NTFS drives. Usually, it is disabled by default and needs some messing around in the Mac terminal to enable it.
It doesn’t work properly all the time and could lead to potential issues with your NTFS file system. For example, it had corrupted data before. Thus, we don’t suggest using this tool and we believe it is disabled by this reason.
Here, we recommend using the paid third-party tools since they are easy-to-use and can do good work for you.
Then, we will introduce these three options for you in the following content.
The Best Paid Third-Party Driver: Paragon NTFS for Mac
Paragon NTFS for Mac can write, edit, delete, copy, or move files on NTFS volumes from your Mac computer. It offers a 10-day free trial. If you want to use it all the time, you need to pay for it.
With it, you don’t have to fiddle with terminal commands to mount partitions manually. Additionally, it can mount partitions automatically and safely. More importantly, it can code with the potential corruption. If you purchase a Seagate drive, you can even get a free download of Paragon NTFS for Mac.
All in all, it does its works well and gives you good user’s experience.
The Best Free Third-Party Drivers: FUSE for macOS
FUSE for macOS is a free solution to access NTFS on Mac. But it is less secure.
If you want to make automatically mount NTFS partitions in read-write mode on Mac, you need to temporarily disable the System Integrity Protection and replace one of Apple’s built-in tools with a binary that is more vulnerable to attack. Thus, your Mac is in danger when using this driver.
However, you can use it to manually mount NTFS partitions in read-write mode if you never mind using the Terminal. This will be safer, but you need to do more work. You can go to google the steps and see how complex they are.
Apple’s Experimental NTFS-Writing Support: Don’t Do This, Seriously
Although we mentioned this method in our article, we still don’t recommend it because it is the least tested. It is just for educational purposes, and it is available on Mac OS 10.12 Sierra. Perhaps, it will be unstable forever.
How to Quickly Format External Hard Drive for Mac and PC without Losing Data
Another way to access NTFS drive on Mac is to convert the NTFS/HFS+ to FAT/exFAT. Then, the drive can be used on both Mac and PC.
There should be some important data on the drive. To keep it safe, you can choose this best NTFS/HFS+ to FAT/exFAT converter: MiniTool Partition Wizard.
How to Convert NTFS to FAT32 or exFAT Without Data Loss
To format hard drive for Mac and Windows without data loss, we suggest using MiniTool Partition Wizard and its 'Convert NTFS to FATS32' function. If you are a personal user, you can try its Professional Edition.
Format External Hard Drive For Mac And Pc Disk Utility
Step 1: Run MiniTool Partition Wizard
Download this software to your computer. Then, you can open the software and input the license key to the pop-out window to get its Professional Edition.
Step 2: Convert NTFS to FAT32 with This Software
After running the program successfully, we can see its main interface as follows:
Here, please select the NTFS partition of external hard drive and choose 'Convert NTFS to FAT' feature from the left action pane. If there is more than one NTFS partition, convert all of them one by one.
At last, click 'Apply' button to make the change executed.
When MiniTool Partition Wizard shows it applies the change successfully, the original NTFS will finally become a FAT32 partition.
By this way, you can easily format an external hard drive for Mac and PC without losing any data. Then, you can share external hard drive between Mac and PC
You Can Convert NTFS to exFAT in 3 Steps
However, if you want to convert NTFS to exFAT to make external hard drive compatible with Mac and PC, 3 steps are required.
Step 1: Transfer Data out from External Hard Drive
You can choose to copy and paste those files to other external devices or internal hard disk of Windows, but it will cost much time. Instead, you can use MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition to create a copy for your external drive, which is faster.
If there is only one NTFS partition on external hard drive, refer to the tutorial Copy Partition to get instructions. However, if there is more than one NTFS partition, view Copy Disk to get specific operations.
Step 2: Create exFAT Partition with MiniTool Partition Wizard
The Free Edition of this software also enables you to do this job.
Firstly, you need to delete the partition by using this software. Just open the software to enter its main interface. Then, choose the target partition and click 'Delete Partition' from the left action pane. After that, you should click 'Apply' to keep this change.
Secondly, the target partition will become unallocated. Here, you need to choose that partition and click on 'Create Partition' from the left action pane.
Thirdly, you will see a pop-out window. Here, you can choose 'exFAT' from the 'File System' setting option. At the same time, you can also set some other parameters for this partition, including 'Partition Label', 'Drive Letter', 'Size And Location'. After that, please click on 'OK'.
Fourthly, you will go back to the main interface. Then, please click on 'Apply' to save these changes.
Finally, an exFAT partition will be created on your external hard disk so that it could be shared between Mac and Windows PC
Step 3: Transfer Data back to External Drive
If you want to share files that you have backed up between Mac and PC, now please transfer these files back to external hard drive.
How to Convert HFS+ to FAT32 or exFAT without Losing Data
Besides, you can format an external hard drive for Mac and Windows by converting HFS+ to FAT32 or exFAT without losing any data.
Step 1: Backup Data in HFS+ Partition on Mac
Just transfer all useful files out from the external hard drive to other devices on Mac. Of course, if you have a backup already, ignore this step.
Step 2: Create a FAT32 or exFAT Partition on Windows PC
Some people may ask why create such partitions on Windows rather than Mac. That is because there are cases reporting FAT32 (MS-DOS) or exFAT partitions created on Mac did not work well on Windows.
Please skip to Solution 1: Format External Hard Drive to FAT32 to get steps to create a FAT32 partitions or go back to Step 2: Create exFAT Partition with MiniTool Partition Wizard to get operations to create an exFAT partition.
How to Make an Empty External Drive Compatible with Mac and PC
If there is no file saved on your external hard drive, how to make external hard drive compatible with Mac and PC?
It's very easy to share it between Mac and PC and you also need a Windows computer, a Mac machine, and the free partition manager MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition.
There are 3 solutions for this case, so please choose the one you like most to format external hard drive Windows 10/8/7.
Solution 1: Format External Hard Drive Windows 10/8/7 to FAT32
Since users are unable to create a FAT32 partition larger than 32GB in Windows Disk Management, they need to use MiniTool Partition Wizard Free.
Please download and install this program on your Windows computer to format an external hard drive for Mac and PC.
Firstly, open the software to enter its main interface as follows. Here, please select the NTFS partition or HFS+ partition of external hard drive, and click 'Delete Partition' feature from the left action pane. If there are multiple partitions on the external disk, please select the disk and click 'Delete All Partitions' feature instead. After that, an unallocated space will be released.
Secondly, you can create one or more FAT32 partitions in unallocated space. Select the unallocated space and choose 'Create Partition' feature from the left side.
Then, you should choose 'FAT32' from the 'File System' option in the pop-out window. Meanwhile, you can set properties for this new partition and click 'OK' to go back to the main window of Partition Wizard.
At last, click 'Apply' button to make all changes performed.
Solution 2: Format External Hard Drive Windows 7/8/10 to exFAT
Format External Hard Drive For Mac And Pc On Windows
Firstly, please delete the NTFS or HFS+ partition in either MiniTool Partition Wizard or Windows Disk Management to release unallocated space. Then, you can create an exFAT partition with MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition by following steps introduced in the section Step 2: Create exFAT Partition with MiniTool Partition Wizard.
Once a FAT32 or exFAT partition is created on your external hard drive, you can share it on both Mac and Windows PC.
Solution 3: Create One HFS+ Partition for Mac and One NTFS Partition for Windows
Alternatively, you can create 2 partitions on the external hard drive: one is for Mac, and the other is for Windows. As to size for each partition, it depends on your own demands. By this way, you can easily format an external hard drive for Mac and Windows.
Step 1: Create a NTFS Partition and a FAT32 Partition
Please run MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition, then delete all the original NTFS or HFS+ partition(s), and create a new NTFS partition as well as a FAT32 partition, and the latter will be formatted to HFS+ in Mac machine.
Then, select the external hard drive and choose 'Delete All Partitions' to create an unallocated space.
Here, select the unallocated space and choose 'Create Partition' feature from the left action pane.
Now, please specify partition label (Windows is recommended), partition type (primary or logical), drive letter, file system (NTFS), cluster size, and partition size (you can change the length of the handle to adjust partition size). Then, click 'OK' to continue.
Now, you can see a NTFS partition is created. Please use the same way to create a FAT32 partition labeled with Mac. At last, click 'Apply' button to make all changes performed.
Step 2: Format the FAT32 Partition to HFS+ Partition on Mac
Please go to Utilities → Disk Utility to get the window below:
Then, select the external hard drive and click 'Partition' tab on the top.
Now, find the FAT32 partition and format it to OS X Extended (Journaled), which is the desired HFS+. Finally, click 'Apply' button to make all changes performed.
After NTFS partition and HFS+ partition are created on your external hard drive, it can be shared between Mac and Windows PC.
Bottom Line
Are you planning to format an external hard drive for Mac and PC? If yes, now try one of our methods to make external hard drive compatible with Mac and PC.
Should you have any problem, just feel free to leave us a message in comment part below or send an email to [email protected].