Reformating An External For Windows And Mac Drive Formatted

Reformating An External For Windows And Mac Drive Formatted

Then there is the inability to write files greater than 4gb on Fat32 and of course the complete lack of support on Windows for a Mac drive formatted with HFS.

One is to use a paid 3rd party tool to add NTFS write support to a Mac, such as Paragons NTFS for Mac tool.

The other is to format your drives with the exFAT file system.

This file system can be read and written by both Mac and Windows with support for single files of up to 128 petabytes Even better, its freely included in both operating systems.

From what I understand, Windows doesnt always like the way Macs do the formatting on some larger drives, though, so give it a try and if your Windows machines dont like it, just format the drive with Windows.

If you need to be sure without the time to test it, it is best to do the formatting on Windows since there dont appear to be any compatibility problems that way.

You dont want to accidentally lose it when you format the drive.

In his spare time though, he loves to travel with his wife, so they usually end up doing a lot of it.

Home is Australia, and while they dont spend all their time travelling the world, Matt and his wife like to take the time to really explore and get to know a place, even if that means spending a lot longer there than normal tourists might.

WARNING: Formatting a disk or volume erases all the files on it.

Open Disk Utility for me In the Disk Utility app on your Mac, choose View Show All Devices.

In the sidebar, select the disk you want to format to use with Windows computers.

Click the Format pop-up menu, then choose one of the following: MS-DOS (FAT): Choose this format if the size of the disk is 32 GB or less.

ExFAT: Choose this format if the size of the disk is over 32 GB.

See also File system formats available in Disk Utility on Mac Partition schemes available in Disk Utility on Mac.