How to format a startup drive for a mac if you want to format a drive that will be used as your mac s startup disk, the procedure is a little different from formatting it for use as a secondary. The volume representing your startup disk is macintosh hd, unless. If you want to make use of your mac s thunderbolt port, then this is the best external hard drive for macs. Once you open the disk utility app, you can see all the. If you are trying to format mac external hard drive, you can go over the process step by step. How to reinstall macos from macos recovery apple support. Make your mac feel like new again with a fresh install of os x. The format is good for handling the files between both os under 4gb size.
Fat32 is the crossplatform format for windows and mac os x. Make sure that the sidebar in disk utility shows the name of your startup disk. If you selected the drive name instead of its description you wont see the scheme. The best ways to format an external drive for windows and mac. Rightclick on the icon for your external drive on mac desktop, then select get info.
Open finder and choose applications utilities disk utility to launch. Heres how to format a drive if you are planning to use it with a mac. Locate the drive name from the left hand side of disk utility and click on it. Even if you accidentally format hard drive on mac os x, you can still recover your lost data. Step one if your hard drive is an external drive, connect it to the computer. If you move a hard drive between the two operating systems, heres what you need to know. How to restore data from a formatted hard drive on mac os x. How to format external ssd for mac time machine mashtips. This is a tutorial to recover files after formatting hard drive with free hard drive recovery software on mac. Click on disk utility then continue first of all to get your mac s hard drive. Once disk utility is open youll see the list of available drives on the left. Learn how to use macos recovery to reinstall the mac operating system on your builtin drive or an external drive.
How to format a hard drive for both windows and mac. Set the format to mac os extended journaled and the scheme to guid partition map. Give the drive a descriptive name and leave the default settings. How to install macos or os x on a new hard drive for your mac. Best external hard drives for macs in 2020 techradar. How to format an external drive for mac compatibility. How to format or partition an external hard drive for mac. Launch disk utility, located in applications utilities. Now your external drive has been formatted to be fully compatible with apple macos, and you can edit, read, and write files to it as you want. Exfrat is the upgraded version or fat32 file system, that supports more than 4gb in a single file. Format a hard drive using mac os x disk utility iclarified. The usb drivers come with the fat format by default. If a wireless network is available, you can choose it from the wi. Format an external hard drive or usb flash drive for mac os x.
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