Your external drive should be listed under the external section. Disk Utility separates these into different sections on the sidebar under the Internal and External headings. Once Disk Utility is open, all of the various hard drives and external drives will be listed. If Spotlight isn’t working for you, open Finder and go to your Applications folder and then go to the Utilities folder and you should find Disk Utility there. To use Spotlight either click the magnifying glass icon ( ) found on the top right corner of your display or open it by pressing +Space.ĭisk Utility is an application on macOS to manage hard drives and partitions.Ī search box will appear on your display, type Disk Utility and this will search for the application on your Mac, the first result should be Disk Utility, with its icon being a hard drive featuring a doctor’s stethoscope. To open Disk Utility, use Spotlight – which is the search functionality of macOS. If you’re using a Mac, Disk Utility is the application that is going to be used to format the drive.
Now, you’re done! You can now copy all your files back onto the external drive. Once that is selected you can give your external hard drive a name if you would like to and then you can click Start to format the drive, this will permanently delete all the information and files on the external drive so ensure you have copied all your data off the drive before formatting – you are responsible for the data on your device so make sure it is in a safe place.
FORMATTING A HARD DRIVE FOR MAC WINDOWS
In this utility, click the dropdown menu for File system and select ExFAT, this is a drive format that is compatible with both macOS and Windows for reading and writing data, for more information on ExFAT take a look at these resources. To format your drive, firstly right click on the external drive listing in Explorer and then select the Format from the dropdown list of options, this will then open the disk formatting utility in Windows. If you’re on a Windows computer, open up Windows Explorer ( +E) and go to This PC, that’s where all of your hard drives and USB drives are listed.īefore we go any further you will want to make sure that you have copied all of your data such as files and folders from the external hard drive as the formatting process permanently deletes all of the files and data on the drive.
Luckily you can format your drive so it does just this, I shall be showing you how in this article.
FORMATTING A HARD DRIVE FOR MAC PORTABLE
So let’s say that you have a external hard drive and you want to use this portable hard drive with both Mac and Windows computers, to access your files and folders flawlessly without any issues.
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