Hard Drive For Mac And Pc

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2.Chosse either FAT32 or exFAT for gaining compatibility in Pc as well Mac. 3.Create two partitions on your hard drive to use with each OS, separately. You can create,delete,format,resize boot camp partition,repartition without any data loss, can make bootable DVD by Stellar partition manager. I found this tool really easy to use and efficient. Why Need to Format External Hard Drive for Mac and PC. To put it simply, if you want to share external hard drive between Mac and PC, you need to format an external hard drive for Mac and PC. Currently, hard drives for Windows PC are always formatted with NTFS, while hard disks for Mac are formatted with HFS+. First, back up the data on the Mac-formatted drive if you have anything important on it. This process won’t actually convert the file system. Instead, we’ll just be wiping the drive and starting over from scratch. Any files on the drive will be erased. If you have a Mac lying around, you can plug the drive into a Mac and back up the files.

Macs and PCs use different file systems, which can make it tricky to put data from your Mac on a flash or hard drive and give it to a Windows user. Tricky, but not impossible. Here’s how:

  • Insert the flash drive or hard drive you want to format for Windows compatibility. Go to the Applications folder on your Mac’s hard drive, then go to the Utilities folder, and launch Disk Utility.
  • Select the drive you want to format. Warning: the following steps will delete any info you currently have on the drive.
  • Click the Erase button.
  • Click the Format menu, then choose either MS-DOS (FAT) or ExFAT.Choose the former if the size of the disk is 32 GB or less. Choose the latter if the size of the disk is over 32 GB.
  • Enter a name for the volume (no more than 11 characters).
  • Click Erase, then click Done.

If you have both Windows and Mac computers in your office, it's important to understand their different storage requirements before buying an external hard drive. Both operating systems use different formats for reading and writing to a hard drive. The only hard drive format that can be reliably used by both is called FAT32, or MS-DOS FAT as it's called on Mac computers. Even if your external hard drive doesn't come pre-formatted in FAT32, you can format it yourself using either a Mac or Windows PC.

External Hard Drive For Mac And Pc Without Formatting

FAT32

The FAT32 format is compatible with both Mac and Windows operating systems. FAT32 has a few disadvantages. It can't store any single file larger than 4GB. It's more prone to disk errors and its larger cluster sizes make its storage slightly less efficient than other format types. However, if you want to read and write files from a Windows and a Mac computer to the same external hard drive, this is usually your best option.

Other Formats

External hard drives formatted specifically for Windows usually use NTFS. Mac OS X can read NTFS drives but can't write to them. Unlike FAT32, NTFS supports Windows file permissions and is more stable. External hard drives designed specifically for Mac computers are usually formatted in HFS+. There are tools available online that allow you to write to NTFS from Mac OS X and tools that allow you to write to HFS+ from a Windows computer, but these tools can be difficult to manage and require some technical expertise. Microsoft's successor to FAT32, exFAT, is compatible with recent versions of Windows and Mac OS and removes the 4GB limitation, but brings its own set of trade-offs (see Resources).

Formatting From a Mac

If you want to format a blank external drive from a Mac computer, launch the Disk Utility, located in the Applications Utility folder. After you select the drive, click the 'Erase' button at the top of the window, and then select 'MS-DOS (FAT)' from the Format menu. If you want to only format a portion of the hard drive, click the 'Partition' button and then use the controls to select a partition size and which format you prefer. If you select a Mac OS format for the partition, it won't be readable from a WIndows PC.

Formatting From a PC

To format a blank drive from a PC, you can use the Windows 8 Disk Management Utility. To open this utility, right-click the bottom-left corner of the desktop and select 'Disk Management' from the menu. After you locate the drive in the list on the left, right-click its name, select 'Format' and then select 'FAT32' from the File System menu. To format only a part of the drive, create a new partition on the drive, right-click the drive name and select 'New Simple Volume.' The New Simple Volume Wizard opens to guide you through the process. Any partition you make that is not in FAT32 is visible from a Mac computer, but the Mac can't write to it.

Virtualbox for mac VirtualBox for Mac is not available from the App Store but can be downloaded from most download sites. VirtualBox for Mac is a virtualization tool that allows you to create virtual machines for Mac OS X, Linux, or Windows running on Mac OS X. A very nice product.

References

Resources

About the Author

A published author and professional speaker, David Weedmark has advised businesses and governments on technology, media and marketing for more than 20 years. He has taught computer science at Algonquin College, has started three successful businesses, and has written hundreds of articles for newspapers and magazines throughout Canada and the United States.

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External Hard Drive For Mac And Pc Format

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How To Format External Hard Drive For Mac And Pc

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