Format a hard drive for both windows and mac on windows 7

Format a hard drive for both windows and mac on windows 7 how to#

Of course, there are other options for transferring files between hard drives cloud-based solutions like Dropbox are convenient and donвЂ™t have compatibility issues, although are sometimes limited in space.

Format a hard drive for both windows and mac on windows 7 how to#

That said, for a daily exchange of files (for example, if you work on a PC but you have a Mac at home), itвЂ™s a practical and effective solution. Looking to reformat an external hard drive for both Mac and Windows use Check out this tutorial on how to properly format your device quickly and easily. This post tells you how to format external hard drive on Windows 10/8/7 or Mac OS X/11, so you can use it to store data on your computer with the right file system. Compatibility issues between Microsoft's Windows and Apple's MacOS operating systems have dramatically decreased over the years, though that doesn't mean those differences have completely.

ItвЂ™s less efficient in terms of space management.В In practice, for the same total size, you can put fewerВ files on a FAT32 formatted disk compared to a NTFS formatted disk.

It doesnвЂ™tВ let you set access permissions to files, so itвЂ™s potentially less secure than the NTFS format (the native OS X format).

It doesnвЂ™tВ support files larger than 4 GB. Do you want to an easy and safe solution to format external hard drive Here are some options for you to completely format external hard drive on Windows and Mac.

There are, however, some things you shouldВ know about the FAT32 format: What problems could I have on anВ HD formatted in FAT32?ДЇAT32 is the only format that both OS X and Windows can read and write without the use of third-party apps. *Warning: this will delete all data on the disk.В If there are documents on there that you want to keep, make a copy of the files on your Mac or on another external drive first.*ДЄnd youвЂ™re done!В Now, the disk can be read and written using both Mac and Windows computers. Open the Erase tab.В From the Format drop-down menu, choose MS-DOS (FAT), better known as FAT32.ДЄfter you choose the format, youвЂ™ll see a box to enter the name of the disk.В Choose any name with a maximum of 11 characters (donвЂ™t worry, it can be changed later).Д¬lick on Erase and confirmВ the operation in the next pop-up window. Connect the disk and open Disk UtilityД¬onnect the hard drive or USB drive to your Mac and then open the Disk Utility app, which is located in Applications> Utilities> Disk Utility.В You can also open the app from Launchpad.Д¬hoose the disk that you want to format for both Mac and PC from the column on the left.

Luckily, with OS X, you can create a disk that can be used by both operating systems in a snap.В HereвЂ™s how.