10/18/2021 0 Comments Format Hard Drive For Mac
If you use Windows, chances are good that you won’t need to reformat your external hard drive—unless you buy it secondhand, or you plan on switching between operating systems, your drive should come ready to use. Here I'll show you how you can erase and format a disk using the command line.Although it’s true that any drive is compatible with both Windows and macOS, most drives come preformatted for Windows out of the box. To do that, the only thing you need is a bit of precise syntax to make sure that you are erasing the proper disk.So what do those four file systems mean, and which one is right for you? At the bottom, you will.Non-Linux computers can use four main file systems: NTFS, HFS+, FAT32, and exFAT. Select the hard drive in the column on the left (usually Macintosh HD). Choosing the right format for your driveOpen Disk Utility from your /Applications/Utilities folder. But fear not: The process is simple.
![]() A drive formatted this way will not mount on a Windows computer without additional software. If you plan to use your drive for Time Machine backups on a Mac, and you use only macOS, use HFS+ (Hierarchical File System Plus, or macOS Extended). Many backup archives and video files are larger than 4 GB. NTFS has huge file and partition size limits that you won’t hit that makes it a better choice than FAT32, which has a 4 GB size limit per file. MacOS and Linux, however, can only read files stored on such a drive they cannot write to an NTFS-formatted drive. NTFS is native to Windows, and most hard drives are preformatted for this file system. Text editor for in macIf 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+. ExFAT works on both macOS and Windows, and it doesn’t have the file size limit that FAT32 does, so you’ll be able to back up movies and other large files. If you need to transfer files larger than 4 GB between Mac and Windows computers, exFAT (extended File Allocation Table) is the best option, although it doesn’t work with File History or Time Machine. Unfortunately, it isn’t any good for storing movies and other large files: FAT32 has a size limit of 4 GB per file, so your files have to be small. FAT32 was introduced in Windows 95 in 1997, but it remains useful because nearly every system can use it. FAT32 (File Allocation Table 32) is an older file system that both Windows machines and Macs still support. Reformatting will delete all the data stored on the drive, so if you need to reformat, do so as soon as you buy the drive. It’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.
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