Looking to share an external hard drive between a Mac and PC? The best way to do it is with a drive formatted as FAT32. Though this format has some limitations, it enjoys nearly universal support from active platforms, including Mac and Windows operating systems, and many gaming and Linux OSs. The chief drawbacks of FAT32 involve file and partition size limitations. FAT32 imposes a size limit of 4GB on single files. So if you work with bulky video clips, for example, adopting FAT32 may not be a good idea.
Jul 10, 2017 - Macs format drives with Apple's HFS+ file system, which Windows won't. On drives connected to your computer — internal ones or external ones connected via USB. To erase this partition, we'll have to wipe the entire disk. 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. Just keep in mind if you want to use your drive also for OS X’s Time Machine backups, we advise you to format your drive through Mac because there is an additional step to make drive compatible.
When formatting partitions, Windows 7's Disk Management utility won't let you create one that's larger than 32GB, whereas Mac OS X Lion can create partitions as large as 2TB using its Disk Utility application. Finally, Mac OS X's Time Machine backup utility won't work with FAT32. Windows prefers to use NTFS (which stands for New Technology File System, though it has been around for nearly 20 years now). Macs running Snow Leopard or Lion can read from drives formatted as NTFS, but they can't write to such drives unless you install a third-party driver or muck about in the Terminal. Conversely, Windows 7 can't read and write to drives formatted as HFS+-also known as Mac OS Extended (journaled)-unless you install third-party software.
Formatting From a Mac To format a drive as FAT32 from a Mac, follow these simple steps. Set up your drive following the manufacturer's instructions. Connect the power supply (if necessary), connect to the Mac via USB or FireWire, and turn on the drive. The drive should automatically mount on your Mac's desktop (if the finder preferences are set to show external drives). If the drive is not formatted, you may get a message saying that the drive is unreadable by Mac OS X and asking you whether you want to format it via Disk Utility. We're going to do this anyway, so open Disk Utility from the prompt or by navigating to /Applications/Utilities.
Select MS-DOS (FAT) as the format. Mac OS X won't let you create a FAT32 partition larger than 2TB; so if your drive is larger than that, you'll need to divide the available drive capacity into multiple partitions. You can format the remaining space as a second FAT32 partition or as an HFS+ partition, or you can leave it as unallocated space. To create a new partition, click the drive in the list on the left side of the Disk Utility menu. Click the Partition button in Disk Utility's main window. By default, Mac OS X will use the GUID partition table to format the drive. You can use this and still share FAT32 volumes with a PC, but if you'll primarily be using the drive with Windows, and if the full capacity of the drive doesn't exceed 2TB, the wiser course is to wipe the drive and then use Windows' Master Boot Record (MBR) partition scheme.
Establishing the partition layout. Click the Partition Layout drop-down menu in Disk Utility, and select the number of partitions you want to create. By default, Disk Utility will divide the available space in half.
You can resize the partitions by clicking the line between the partitions and dragging it up or down to increase or decrease the capacity of one or the other side. Click on whichever partition segment you want to format as FAT32. Type a name for that partition in the Name field and choose the FAT32 option from the Format drop-down menu.
Once everything is arranged as you want it, click apply. A progress bar will appear at the bottom right of the window as Disk Utility creates the requested partitions.
Once it finishes creating them, you can move the drive between Macs and Windows PCs, and move files back and forth easily. Formatting From a PC Select your hard drive, and choose 'Convert to MBR Disk'.Here's how to create a FAT32 partition from a Windows 7 PC. Open the Disk Management utility. To do so, select Start, Control Panel, System and Security, Create and format hard disk partitions.
Alternatively, press the Start button and start typing partitions. Find the drive you'd like to format; in my case, it was Disk 5.
Click the disk number, and select Convert to MBR Disk ('MBR' stands for 'Master Boot Record'). Right-click the unallocated segment in the next field over, select New Simple Volume, and click Next when the wizard launches.
Change the value in the Simple Volume size field to 32,768MB or less-it needs to be under 32GB, to satisfy the format's file limit. Assign a drive letter, and click Next. Formatting the partition. Choose the drive letter to be assigned and click Next. Select FAT32 from the File System drop down menu, label the volume however you like, check the box next to Perform a quick format, and click Next. The resulting window tells you that you have successfully completed creating the volume. Click Finish and you're ready to go.
Advertisement If you’ve just purchased a new external hard drive for your Mac, it’s important to take the time to prepare your hard drive for use with Mac OS X. Like a lot of operating systems, Mac OS X offers only limited support for other file systems. Without proper preparation, you might even have issues writing files to the drive. Between Mac OS X, Windows and Linux, there are a lot of Different hard drives and operating systems may use different file systems. Here's what that means and what you need to know. On the market, and each operating system has its own preference.
On Windows, you’re likely to encounter FAT and NTFS, Linux normally goes with ext3 or ext4 and Mac OS X uses HFS+. Different File Systems NTFS, FAT and HFS+ are the main file systems you’ll need to know about. We’ll go over these one by one, considering the pros and cons of each and how you get them to play nice with Mac OS X: NTFS Windows is still the most used operating system around.
As a result, most store-bought hardware is also configured for use on Windows computers. NTFS is the main file system that’s used on Windows computers these days, and most new external hard drives will be formatted to NTFS. Mac OS X offers only limited support for NTFS out of the box.
You’ll be able to see and read files on NTFS disks, but unable to write your own files to the disk as Apple would have to license the technology from Microsoft (which means paying them a fee). To get your computer up and running with NTFS, you’ll need a third-party NTFS driver – a piece of software that tells your computer how to communicate with the drive. Perhaps the most famous third-party NTFS driver is (shown above). For the reasonable price of $20, you’ll get near-seamless NTFS support on your Mac.
A free alternative comes in the form of NTFS-3G. Although the project is no longer actively supported, you can still use it to gain NTFS support on your Mac. The process is a little more convoluted, especially for new Mac computers, but Justin Pot’s article shows you all the steps to Plugging in a USB hard drive and finding out you cannot write to it is frustrating, but easy to fix. on your Mac.
FAT32 and exFAT Although NTFS is mostly running the game these days, Windows used to revolve around FAT. It’s an older file system with one main disadvantage: a FAT drive can’t store files larger than 4GB. There are advantages, too: FAT is by far the most supported file system. Windows, Mac and Linux all work with FAT out of the box nowadays.
ExFAT is an extension of the FAT file system that does away with the 4GB file size cap. Both Windows and Mac OS X computers play well with exFAT these days. For the standard user, exFAT is a good way to render your drive compatible with these two operating systems. However, you’ll need to install exFAT drivers to be able to use it on Linux computers.
HFS+ By default your Mac will use HFS+, also known as Mac OS Extended. Because Mac OS X is designed with HFS+ in mind, an HFS+ formatted drive will give you the least amount of troubles.
It has most of the advantages of NTFS, but without the hiccups that come with reverse engineered NTFS drivers. Which To Choose It all boils down to this: on what operating systems do you intend to use your external hard drive? If you’ll only use it on Mac OS X, HFS+ (or Mac OS Extended) is the obvious choice. To make your drive compatible with other operating systems, you’ll need a different file system. NTFS works like a charm if you’re willing to install third-party drivers on your Mac. Keep in mind that other Mac computers (without NTFS drivers) will still be unable to write to the drive in that case. Out of the box compatibility is provided for FAT/FAT32, but with that also comes a 4GB file size limit.
ExFAT gets rid of that file size limit at the cost of compatibility with Linux computers. How To Format A New Hard Drive Once you’ve decided which file system is best for you, you might have to reformat your external drive. Start by opening Applications Utilities Disk Utility. At the left hand side column, select your external drive.
In the Erase tab, select the file system and name your drive. When you’re ready, click Erase Be aware that this will remove all files that are currently on your drive! If you want to add multiple partitions to your drive, you can find similar formatting options in the Partition tab. You’ll notice there are a few different options for Mac OS Extended. In general, you’ll want Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
You can use (Journaled, Encrypted) to encrypt the entire drive. However, this will make them a tad harder to work with in Disk Utility and won’t allow other computers to access the files.
Also, if you lose the password, you won’t have a way of accessing your files. Never choose (Case-sensitive), unless you know what you’re doing.
A lot of applications can’t properly work with case-sensitive file paths. What filesystem are you going with to prepare your external hard drive, and why? Let us know in the comments section below! Image credit: stu360 Explore more about:,.