Choose a File System for both Windows and Mac.

It is just for educational purposes, and it is available on Mac OS Perhaps, it will be unstable forever. Then, the drive can be used on both Mac and PC. There should be some important data on the drive. If you are a personal user, you can try its Professional Edition. Buy Now. Download this software to your computer.

How to Format a Large Hard Drive With FAT or FAT32

Then, you can open the software and input the license key to the pop-out window to get its Professional Edition. If there is more than one NTFS partition, convert all of them one by one. 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 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.

Free Download. Firstly, you need to delete the partition by using this software. Just open the software to enter its main interface.

Which File Format to Choose When Formatting USB Drive on Mac

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.

About file system formats

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. 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.

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Then, please click on " Apply " to save these changes. 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. If your USB flash drive is not recognized by your Apple Mac computer because it has a different format it is kind of difficult to format it. You may not know how to format your USB flash drive to make it compatible with your Mac system but we do and will show you how to do it in this article.

Mac Systems have a different OS to Windows and this is where most of the problems like. There are ways to format a flash drive that runs on a different format and we will show you steps to take to remedy the situation. You will have to wait a while for the format to be completed.

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Type in :diskutill to check if the process was successful. If you follow these steps religiously you should be able to resolve the issue quickly.


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If you're searching for a way that helps you recover formatted USB drive on Mac, download Recoverit Data Recovery software and go to the page telling you how to restore formatted hard drive. Sue Wen. Related: Further read and know more complete details on formatting external hard drive for Mac. Note that you can't format it on OS X, you have to format it on Windows for it to be compatible with both platforms Update : A lot of you are noting that OS X formats these just fine, so your mileage may vary.

To do so, just:. From then on, that drive should work fantastically between Mac and Windows machines. The A.