

The operating system has an inbuilt tool, which is known as. To do this on Windows 8 or Windows 7, press the Windows key once, type cmd, and press Ctrl+Shift+Enter. Just like Windows, macOS also gives us a seamless option to format the hard drives for Mac (and PC).

Next, open a Command Prompt window as administrator. For example, in the screenshot below, the Mac-formatted drive is Disk 2. First, note the number of the disk in the disk management window. This process erases everything on the disk, including its files and all its partitions. To erase this partition, we’ll have to wipe the entire disk. And because your Mac can read the NTFS drive. And the other Finder windows on the ExFAT drive. One finder window on the NTFS formatted drive. You then open two finder windows on your Mac. This partition is marked as protected, so you can’t just right-click and delete it - the delete option will be disabled. By this I mean the NTFS drive with your documents on and the newly formatted ExFAT drive. The Mac drive may have an “EFI System Partition” on it. You can then right-click in the empty space and select New Simple Volume to create a partition and format it with the Windows NTFS or FAT32 file systems. If you’re lucky, you can just right-click each partition on the Mac drive and select Delete Volume to remove the partitions.

Be sure you’ve identified the Mac drive - if you accidentally delete partitions from another drive, you could damage your Windows installation or lose your files. Locate the Mac drive in the list of disks. This tool allows you to manage the partitions on drives connected to your computer - internal ones or external ones connected via USB. Press Windows Key + R to open the Run dialog, type diskmgmt.msc into the box, and press Enter to open it.
FORMAT EXTERNAL DRIVE FOR MAC AND PC MAC OS X
Because Mac OS X Mountain Lion does not natively support writing to an. RELATED: Understanding Hard Drive Partitioning with Disk Managementįirst, open the Windows Disk Management tool. Mac OS X and Windows can both read and write to disks in the FAT or ExFat format. You’ll probably want to uninstall Java when you’re done.Įrase the Mac Partitions, Including the EFI System Partition
FORMAT EXTERNAL DRIVE FOR MAC AND PC INSTALL
HFSExplorer unfortunately requires you install Java to use it, but it’s the only free option here. If you only have Windows systems available, you can use HFSExplorer to copy files from the drive onto your Windows system drive or another drive. If you have a Mac lying around, you can plug the drive into a Mac and back up the files. Instead, we’ll just be wiping the drive and starting over from scratch. This process won’t actually convert the file system. First, back up the data on the Mac-formatted drive if you have anything important on it.
