How to format external hard disk for Mac and Windows
You can format your external hard disk for Mac and Window. To format hard disk that usable for Mac and Windows, you need to select “MS DOS File System” for formating your hard disk.
To format your hard disk for Mac and Windows on Mac follow the steps below:-
- Go to Finder -> Application -> Utilities
- Double click for Disk Utility
- Select the external Hard Disk you wish to format at the left column
- Click on the Erase tab
- At the “Volume Format” select “MS-DOS File System”
- If you confirm to format your hard disk for mac and windows, Click on “Erase” button.
- Pop up window will ask to verify the erase procedure. Click the erase button again in the window to start the erase process.
* All the data in the external hard disk will not be permanently removed after this steps. - Once the erase process finish, your external hard disk may be able to use in Mac and Windows.
P/S: This tutorial is also suitable for format thumb drive to be used on Mac and Window.
Tags: format hard disk, format hard disk mac, format hdd, format mac hard disk, formatting hard disk, hard disk mac, Mac
Posted at June 25th, 2008 by chua
If you think this article helps you to solve your problem and clear your headache, feel free to buy me a drink :)
December 17th, 2008 at 8:58 am
Thanks for the very good instructions!
December 24th, 2008 at 10:12 pm
Thanks for your information
Good Luck !
January 14th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
On Leopard there is no option for MSDOS
January 14th, 2009 at 6:32 pm
I am incorrect. That is only in partition mode. When you select the whole disk it is there. Sorry
February 1st, 2009 at 12:57 am
This works for access r/w to the external HD, however, the time machine don’t accept the MS-Dos format for external backup… anyway to do it, and still be able to use the HD on the PCs?
February 1st, 2009 at 9:53 am
Marv: If you r using Time Machine, you need to have a dedicated HD for your time machine. Else the time machine wont work.
February 1st, 2009 at 8:53 pm
I’ve tried ur steps.. but i got confused at the 6 step.. after i pressed the erase button, a pop up window will appear right?? is it the time machine?? i’m kinda worried if all of my data lost after that.. because i’ve used it for 70GB.. and i don’t want to lose it.. could u give me more details for the guidance?? thanks..
February 1st, 2009 at 11:04 pm
Klein: if you are using your external HDD for time machine, DO NOT FOLLOW THESE STEPS. IT WILL ERASE YOUR HDD DATA.
If you want to use your external HDD for Time machine and share data with Windows, you need 2 separate partitions. 1st partition for Mac Time Machine which the space must be the same as your Mac machine HDD. 2nd partition can be formatted using the steps above for data sharing.
February 1st, 2009 at 11:51 pm
hahaha…3x. thanks a lot for ur information.. but it seems all of my data has been lost.. maybe i’m not in the lucky day.. okay.. i’ll try ur guide again.. thank you very much..
March 12th, 2009 at 8:40 am
Thanks so so so much! Clear and simple, the best! Thanks
March 25th, 2009 at 3:26 am
I have a harddrive with 200 gb. It works perfect with windows and mac. I can read and write in both systems. It is formatted in fat32.
But my new 500 gb I can’t format in fat32 if I want to use more than 32gb. It is now ntfs and works fine in windows. But i can only read it in mac and not write to it. Can anyone help me? I need to use both systems. How can I do that?
March 25th, 2009 at 9:26 am
Thomas: you can try to use MacFuse. I’ve not tried this b4 but u can take a look http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/
March 25th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
I’m in the same boat. FAT32 is useless for any length HD video, yet it seems to be
the only format both Mac and Windows can read/write. I have a Passport portable USB disk I intended to share my video (of weddings,birthdays, etc), but it seems useless for this purpose. How can I read/write NTFS for this disk so I can share with my less enlightened Windows brethern ?
March 26th, 2009 at 8:18 am
i’ve one more stupid solution, you might wan to do few partitions to utilize the HDD.
April 4th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
So how do I recover the data that just got erased?
April 9th, 2009 at 10:26 am
Thank you very much!
I thought my USB was broken, but the disk utility fixed it perfectly!
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:24 am
I currently bought a Tb external hard drive so i could clear out some of the information on my computers. My question is that it is already formated for Mac OS, is it possible for me to have it run for both windows and mac? and if so could you please let me know?
April 23rd, 2009 at 10:09 pm
It depends on the file system in ur ext HDD.
u can test your HDD for Mac compatible by writting some files. if u can write successful then it should be ok.
but i heard someone said Mac can use more than 320GB ext HDD. not really sure how true is tat…
May 18th, 2009 at 9:42 pm
It works great! Thank you
June 3rd, 2009 at 12:05 am
The day is coming when both Windows and Macs will be able to use XFS, but until then, FAT32 is the only format that both read natively, and it’s major limitation is that it has a max file size of 2 Gigabytes for any single file (so DVD Images, or long movies can’t be written to it).
Macs can read NTFS with MacFUSE (free) and Windows can read HFS+ (mac discs) with MacDrive (commercial software).
June 3rd, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Oops, I meant ZFS not XFS. XFS is
Since I’m back on the subject, there are other solutions, like using ext3 from Linux, which can be supported in OS X & XP.
MacFUSE with NTFS-3G is probably the best solution though. NTFS-3G allows you to read/write/format to your external drive and be able to share it with Windows 2000, XP, Vista friends. It includes MacFUSE and the NTFS Driver.
NTFS-3G 2009.4.4 – http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/
NOTE: If you need raw performance, you need a drive that is formated for the OS. NTFS on OS X is noticably slower then XP, and I suspect HFS+ on XP would be slower than on OS X.
July 1st, 2009 at 7:58 am
Thank you so much for this guide!!!
July 9th, 2009 at 9:41 am
i tried this and all my data are gone. how do i restore them back??thanks =]
July 22nd, 2009 at 7:28 am
I saw up above that you have a person asking about setting up time machine and sharing files by creating a partition in the drive. What are the steps that you have to take to do that? Whats first in the process? Thanks!!
July 22nd, 2009 at 7:30 am
I forgot to mention that I want the file reading section to go across both platforms (mac and Pc). If that makes any difference…
July 22nd, 2009 at 11:00 am
hi Sean, once you format your external hard disk with this method, it can be read by Mac and Window.
July 22nd, 2009 at 11:01 am
sorry sean, i didnt include the steps for partitioning in this post. Will write another tutorial on that asap.
August 16th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
Thank you so much for ur help.
u greatly helped me…
September 6th, 2009 at 8:13 am
Thank you for the helpful instructions!!!
September 14th, 2009 at 8:53 pm
This comment is to Sherly -
It seem pretty shabby to me that you have lost all your data because they forgot to tell you that Time Machine will delete all your data & yet nobody has the humanity to tell you that there is no way to recover your data and thatthey are sorry for causing you this grief. I am only a casual visitor to this site but I’m pretty horrified at what I read. Yes it is your fault because you should have been prepared to pay for proper advice and becasue you shouldhave read the Time Machine’s message (which is pretty clear) but never-the-less my heart goes out to you.
Colin
October 7th, 2009 at 12:13 pm
Thank you for your support so much I can do it completely…
October 15th, 2009 at 2:04 am
I have a PowerBook G4, 80gb HDD and it’s nearly full. 46gb is my itunes library. I wish to utilize an external HDD to use as my primary OS. Therefore I can continue to download music,et al. What are the procedures to format an external to operate as a primary OS? Or can I move my itunes to this portable HDD and access it online?
I’ll appreciate any feedback on this.
October 15th, 2009 at 9:23 am
hi Jeff, from what i know it’s not possible to have the external HDD to hold the primary OS. However, u might wan to consider to store all your music in external HDD, then it will solve all your problem.
November 10th, 2009 at 11:54 am
Thank you very much ^ ^
November 10th, 2009 at 1:42 pm
thank you very much. It ended up deleting all my data which was 400gb I have no idea how I will survive.
November 30th, 2009 at 11:51 pm
that’s really great. But I cannot transfer the files which is above 4GB.
it’s show error !! pls kindly solve that problem.
December 22nd, 2009 at 2:18 pm
Thank you so much ^_^
December 29th, 2009 at 4:37 am
Can MS DOS read AND write in both windows AND mac os x? And can the files be over 4GB??
December 29th, 2009 at 8:41 am
Anne, once ur HDD format under FAT32, Ms DOS is able to read and write.
i’ve no chance to test the 4GB file under Ms DOS.
If you tested do let me know TQ
January 24th, 2010 at 9:23 am
yes,it works,but when i wanna transfer files from mac to my hardisk it always say
“the finder cant complete….”
any suggestion what happened ?
January 25th, 2010 at 1:32 pm
hi Joko, if i’m not mistaken the error message is “The Finder cannot complete the operation because (x) could not be read or written. (Error code -36)”
Error code – 36 usually indicates a corrupted file. so meaning your file might be corrupted.
February 21st, 2010 at 3:37 am
Hello, i have a macbook tiger, and I have just bought an external harddisk. But on my utilities there are no such thing as “Disk utility” Help me pleeeeeease, this is the second harddisc i have bougt!
March 4th, 2010 at 9:26 pm
Thanks, Really, really easy
March 9th, 2010 at 4:40 am
wow… here goes the mac illusion. what a desilusion to see that now i finaly made the step to try this mac after xx years of windows… butm i still have many windows machines around, a now i find out, that i have to BUY a program to fully use usb discs on the two systems?????
i cannot write to ntfs on mac, but i need ntfs for hd movies so fat 32 won’t do. if i format for mac, my windows will not be able to read.write. or i will have to buy a program to do that or go freaky with strange utils… i ttried mac to be rid of this crap!
feel very sad now. what to do?
i want to store hd movies on my 2tb disc sometimes from my mac and sometimes from my windows. then i also use a music program on mac and on windows laptop, so they both have to write mp3 tags etc… then i also take my hd to friends on windows who will not want to install software to be able to read my sets from my disc!!
i’m puzzeld as what to do now to get an elegant solution….