Click on the name of the external drive in the left panel of the Disk Utility.Open the Disk Utility tool on your Mac.Start the computer and plug in the external HDD.To format an external hard drive on your Mac, you need to complete the following steps:
How to format external hard drive for Mac Follow the instructions bellow to format your external hard drive to exFAT. Your mac should then be able to read the hard drive even if you can’t upload or edit files. To get around this problem you will need to revert to NTFS formatting using your windows PC. This can happen if the external hard drive was formatted with a windows computer. You may encounter that your Mac with M1 chip cannot mount the external hard drive event when using exFAT formatting. Mac cannot mount external drive even with exFAT formatting. How to format external hard drive for Mac.Mac cannot mount external drive even with exFAT formatting.If Windows recognizes the drive, open File Explorer and navigate to “This PC.” In your “Devices and Drives” list, right-click the USB drive that you want to use as a universal drive and select “Format” from the list. Warning: The contents of the drive will be erased when you click “Format Disk.” Make sure that you’ve backed up your important files first. If Windows says that it doesn’t recognize the drive (and you’ve already backed up any data on it), click “Format Disk,” and then skip the next step. RELATED: What's the Best Way to Back Up My Computer? How to Format a USB Drive as exFAT on Windowsįirst, plug the USB drive that you’d like to format as a universal Mac/Windows drive into your Windows machine. If the USB drive is formatted as a Windows drive, it’s probably best to back it up with a Windows Machine. If the USB drive is formatted with the Mac file system, you’ll need to use a Mac to transfer the data off of the drive.
Formatting a drive always erases all of the data on the drive. If the USB drive that you want to use as a universal transfer drive contains any data that you want to keep, you’ll need to back up that data onto another disk or a cloud backup service first. RELATED: Why Does Windows Want to Format My Mac Drives? Before You Get Started: Back Up the USB Drive First This disk preparation setup process is called “ formatting.” Below, we’ll show you how to set up a USB drive as exFAT for both Windows and Mac. That file system is called exFAT, and it’s designed for flash media cross-platform compatibility. If you’re frequently using both Macs and PCs with the same drive, the ideal solution is to configure a USB drive with a file system that both operating systems can read. And likewise, if you format a USB drive as NTFS on Windows, Macs can read it but not write to it (although there are some ways around it).
So here’s the problem: If you format a USB drive as APFS on a Mac, Windows 10 won’t read it without third-party tools (and will actually ask to format it).
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