How To Partition, Format External Hard Drive On Mac For Mac

“I have a 1TB WD Elements Portable USB 3.0 hard drive, formatted with NTFS and used with PC running Windows 10. It is used to work very well. Nowadays, I want to use this WD hard drive with my Mac desktop to copy some files to the hard drive. I wonder whether I can just use the WD hard drive with Mac without reformatting or need to reformat the WD hard drive for Mac? If it is necessary to reformat the hard drive, what kind of file system should I reformat it as? Is there any advice?” You can reformat WD Elements hard drive for Mac If you connect your WD hard drive without reformatting, you’ll be unable to copy files to the disk as Mac read only supports NTFS file system.

• Formatting External Hard Drive For Mac
• How To Partition Format External Hard Drive On Mac For Mac Mac

Optional Formatting and Partitioning. You can use LaCie Setup Assistant to format your LaCie hard drive when it is first connected to a computer (Mac. Here's how to split your Mac hard drive into multiple partitions or volumes so that you can run more than one OS on your Mac, or divide up your Mac so different users can have their own space.

In such case, you can reformat WD hard drive to make it compatible with Mac operating system. Mac OS X is able to support HFS+, FAT32 and exFAT drives and Windows can support NTFS, FAT32 and exFAT.

Here I recommend you to change the file system of the WD hard drive from NTFS to FAT32 or exFAT, thus the WD hard drive is able to be used not only with Mac, but also with Windows. And if there is large file beyond 4GB in file size, exFAT file system will be the better choice as FAT32 is with file size limit. How to reformat WD hard drive for Mac? After realizing that you can or exFAT to make it compatible with Mac OS X and still can be used under Windows, it is time to realize how to reformat external WD hard drive in Windows successfully.

Formatting External Hard Drive For Mac

• By partition, it means you are dividing storage space of hard drive into sections or multiple partitions. For instance, you can partition 1TB hard drive space into two 500GB sections. Number of partitions depend on you, you can make multiple partitions according to your need.
• Pro tip: If you want to use the external drive for both Mac and PC, you can also select 'ExFAT'. Learn more about the differences between these file systems from this thread. By the way, you can also rename your external drive.

And the following parts will offer you detailed information. Format WD hard drive to exFAT via Diskpart The first tool occurs to your mind to format WD hard drive might be File Explorer. However, in File Explorer, if you right click partition on the WD hard drive and choose “Format”, you’ll find that there is.

At this time, you can format WD hard drive to exFAT via Diskpart. The steps are listed as follows: 1. Press “Windows + R” simultaneously, input “diskpart” in the pop-up box, and hit “Enter” to run Diskpart utility as administrator. In Diskpart window, input the following commands and every command shall come with pressing Enter key. list disk. select disk n, where “n” is the number of the WD hard drive.

list partition. select partition m, where “m” is the WD hard drive partition number. format fs=exfat After the partition on the WD hard drive has been formatted successfully, you can type “exit” to close up the window.

PS:Format will erase all data on the partition of WD hard drive; therefore you need to back up your important data at first. Format WD hard drive via professional format tool It seems rather simple to employ Diskpart to reformat WD hard drive to exFAT for Mac, but you are likely to make mistakes even format wrong partition when using Diskpart if you are unfamiliar with computer knowledge. At this point, you can try the comprehensive and powerful GUI format tool –, which allows you to format hard drive like WD hard drive, Samsung hard drive and Seagate hard drive etc. To exFAT, FAT32, NTFS, Ext2, Ext3 and Ext4 in Windows 10/8/7, XP and Vista. To reformat WD hard drive to exFAT via AOMEI Partition Assistant, and install in advance. And you should make sure that the WD hard drive can be detected by Windows as well. Let’s have a look of the detailed steps to format hard drive to exFAT in Windows 10.

Run AOMEI Partition Assistant. Right click the partition on the WD hard drive and choose “Format Partition”. Step 2. Choose exFAT among the listed file systems on the drop-down menu. Here you can add “Partition Label” to the partition going to be formatted if you want. Step 3. Return to the main interface. Check the pending operations and click “Apply” to execute it.

After a while, the WD hard drive will be formatted to exFAT for Mac through AOMEI Partition Assistant. Then file is able to be copied to it under Mac operating system. Notices:. AOMEI Partition Assistant allows you to convert NTFS WD external hard drive to FAT32 without data loss as well. It also can be applied to format SD card, USB flash drive to different file systems mentioned above.

How To Partition Format External Hard Drive On Mac For Mac Mac

Verdict If your WD hard drive is formatted with NTFS, both of Diskpart and AOMEI Partition Assistant can help you to reformat the WD hard drive for Mac. You can choose one of the tools to format hard drive to exFAT as you like.

What’s more, AOMEI Partition is also featured with other functions like copy disk, migrate OS from MBR disk to MBR and so on. Cme uf series midi keyboard driver for mac free. If you need to, you need to upgrade it to version.