Format External Hard Drive For Mac Windows And Linux

Be aware that formatting a hard drive erases the drive s contents.

Format external hard drive for mac windows and linux.

Plug in your external hdd to the usb port of your computer then go to my computer find your external drive right click it and select format. Now that we know the good and bad about every file system let see how to format a drive in windows mac and linux. Want to use external hard drive under both windows pc and mac. The most compatible option is fat32 but as we.

The answer isn t always fat32. Formatting your drive will wipe out all the data in it. In this case you should consider the hurdle that these operating systems support different filesystems. The best ways to format an external drive for windows and mac.

On windows 10 windows 8 1 and windows 7 search for command and simply right click command prompt shortcut from the search results and select run as administrator. Compare the different options for formatting an external hard drive to work with windows and mac. Choose a format under file system. Formatting a hard drive on windows is a simple affair especially if you leave everything as default.

Formatting a hard drive can change the file system to make it compatible with your computer s operating system as well as fix any non physical errors on the drive itself. This wikihow teaches you how to change an external usb hard drive s format on windows and mac computers. That said if you want to change settings you ll need to know the details of each. Format linux usb drive to recover full disk space in windows 10.

The default file system in windows is ntfs while mac os users hfs. Right click on the external hard drive and click format. However linux supports ntfs which makes for a decent go between if you have both windows and linux machines. Run administrator command prompt.

You can then right click in the empty space and select new simple volume to create a partition and format it with the windows ntfs or fat32 file systems. Linux has its own proprietary ext formats and if you are only going to use your external drive with a linux machine you can safely go ahead and pick that format. But if you want the external hard drive to also work on a mac. The instructions below are for windows 10 but other versions of windows from windows 7 and up can also format an external drive as exfat for use with mac as well.

If you re lucky you can just right click each partition on the mac drive and select delete volume to remove the partitions. The mac drive may have an efi system partition on it. Mac can also read ntfs. By default windows computers will choose ntfs new technology file system for you because that s the native microsoft filing system.