How to format a external drive for mac how to#

You will have to transfer all data on the disk to your desktop whilst you perform the partitioning, then transfer back to the correct partition when you are finished Contact Us On the desktop you can see the two different drives that have been created, this is not required for all users but does come in handy when you are doing a lot of data recovery or transfer from macs to windows formatted externals that can not be written to. Here we can see the final disk setup with 2 partitions as we set them up.

The same will apply to the second partition when selected.ДЄfter clicking on Apply you will be prompted that you are about to partition the disk. Step 3 вЂ“ Change settings on second partition Highlighting the top partition will allow us to change the settings such as size, Name and format type. Step 2 вЂ“ Change settings onВ first partition Open your disk utility app found in Utilities Click on partition then click current to select 2 partitions then apply. IMPORTANT: ALL DATA WILL BE LOST DURING THIS PROCESS Step 1 вЂ“ Open disk utility I am using a 4GB USB stick for the purpose of this demo but the same will apply to an external disk.

How to format a external drive for mac how to#

I have also tried to recover data from a mac but could not do this due to the formatted drive being incompatible, so here I will run through a how to partition a drive using your mac for both a windows and mac partition.

There are places that sell external disks for macs but any drive will do the job. You can use any disk drive on a mac but in order for it to work the drive will need to be formatted.