Yo just got a new external hard drive and want to use it on your Mac. However, the Mac OS does not allow you to write data to the drive. You may wonder how to reformat an external hard drive on Mac. Follow the tutorial below, you'll get everything covered.
Bonus: How to Recover Data from Formatted External Hard Drive on Mac
Reformatting an external hard drive for use with Mac OSX is not as difficult as it might seem. In a few simple steps you are ready to go and can save your back-up files to the external drive, keeping your information safe and giving you peace of mind. Keep in mind that a MAC can generally read other file formats, but for the best performance and to create a bootable disk, formatting exclusively for MAC is required. My passport for mac 4tb review.
Part 1: Which File Format You Should Choose?
Select your external drive in the sidebar, click 'Restore' in the menu, and then select your main drive as the 'Restore From' option. You can also choose an ISO image, but that doesn't have much use here. Click 'Restore,' and Disk Utility will start the copying process. Boot into Windows from external Boot Camp drive. Step 33: Open System Preferences → Startup Disk. Step 34: Click the Lock in the bottom left-hand corner, and enter your Mac's administrator. Click the Restart button or close the Startup Disk preference pane. Use the Startup Disk preference pane to select the startup drive to use. In this example I've selected an external volume that contains macOS Catalina. To use the Startup Manager to temporarily select the startup device.
Before you begin formatting the drive, there are a few things to do. The most important, you should decide which format to use.
There are a few file formats you can use, but it depends on the purpose you want to use the drive for. Which one is right for your circumstance? We'll describe them here, you'll know your choice after reading the details.
APFS: This is the default file system in Macs with High Sierra. It is efficient and reliable. However, it won't be readable and usable on machines that are not running Mac High Sierra, and Windows or Linux PCs. What's more, it is compatible with SSD and flash storage devices only.
Mac OS Extended (Journaled/HFS+): If you didn't update your Mac OS to High Sierra, the default file system on your Mac shoule be Mac OS Extended. Mac OS Extended (encrypted) would be an ideal option if you probably carry your laptop or external drive here and there. You can encrypt it so that no one can access the contents on your drive.
MS-DOS FAT (aka FAT32): In addition to Mac, it can also be written and read by Linux and Windows. It enables you to regularly share files with your friends who own a PC. Nevertheless, this older file system is limited to no more than 4GB and there might be security issue and disk errors.
ExFAT: It is similar to ExFAT which can be read by both Windows and Mac, but it can store more than 4GB files.
NTFS: As the default file system in Windows, it can only read by Mac OS, writing to it is not available. Luckily, there are third-party tools to help you do so.
Part 2: Format External Hard Drive for Mac with Disk Utility
Formatting an external hard drive would erase everything on it. Hence, you must backup your important files before reformatting the drive if you want to save them. The easiest way is to drag it from one drive to another.
All is set, then you can go ahead to format the drive on your Mac. Disk utility - the MacOS utility application can help you with this. Just follow these steps below:
Step 1. Connect the external drive or the USB drive to the MAC.
Step 2. Start the Disk Utility, located under Applications > Utilities.
Step 3. Find the name of the drive in the left side of the Utilities window and select it. And click Erase button.
Step 4. Follow on-screen prompts to choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled) file system and allow the disk to format.
Bonus: How to Recover Data from Formatted External Hard Drive on Mac
In case you forgot to backup files before formatting the external drive. Here comes the cure - iMyFone AnyRecover - a one-stop solution to recover deleted, lost or formatted files from Mac.
Follow these simple steps using AnyRecover to get your files back!
Get Ready!
First, download and install AnyRecover, following on-screen prompts to accomplish the task.
AnyRecover 20% off Coupon Code: ANY-ART-D20
Don't miss the opportunity to get AnyRecover license at the lowest price on the market. Don't know how to apply it, check the instructions here:
Get Set!
1. After loading AnyRecover, plug your external hard drive into your Mac directly or via USB.
2. Next select the drive under 'External Removable Devices' tab, click 'Start' to begin scanning lost files on the drive.
Go!
1. AnyRecover takes a moment to scan your drive. Once done, it will list out all scanning results by file type.
2. Double click a single file to preview it before recovery.
3. Select the files and press Recover to get them back.
What If?
Best External Hard Disk Drives
What if my files were not found? Fear not. We can take this a step further. Enable 'Deep Scan' to try one more time, follow the steps above just as before to locate and recover your files.
It is plain to see that AnyRecover for Mac is a tool worthy of top shelf treatment in your arsenal of items that are used to defend, recover and keep your system up and running. Don't get caught without the file you need for that meeting or stumbling looking for baby photos that were stored on disk and suddenly 'hid' from your view. Allow AnyRecover to find and recover your lost files. AnyRecover is easy to use but provides sophisticated results that mean you know what you're doing!
David Miller April 2, 2007 TutorialsMac
MS-DOS FAT (aka FAT32): In addition to Mac, it can also be written and read by Linux and Windows. It enables you to regularly share files with your friends who own a PC. Nevertheless, this older file system is limited to no more than 4GB and there might be security issue and disk errors.
ExFAT: It is similar to ExFAT which can be read by both Windows and Mac, but it can store more than 4GB files.
NTFS: As the default file system in Windows, it can only read by Mac OS, writing to it is not available. Luckily, there are third-party tools to help you do so.
Part 2: Format External Hard Drive for Mac with Disk Utility
Formatting an external hard drive would erase everything on it. Hence, you must backup your important files before reformatting the drive if you want to save them. The easiest way is to drag it from one drive to another.
All is set, then you can go ahead to format the drive on your Mac. Disk utility - the MacOS utility application can help you with this. Just follow these steps below:
Step 1. Connect the external drive or the USB drive to the MAC.
Step 2. Start the Disk Utility, located under Applications > Utilities.
Step 3. Find the name of the drive in the left side of the Utilities window and select it. And click Erase button.
Step 4. Follow on-screen prompts to choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled) file system and allow the disk to format.
Bonus: How to Recover Data from Formatted External Hard Drive on Mac
In case you forgot to backup files before formatting the external drive. Here comes the cure - iMyFone AnyRecover - a one-stop solution to recover deleted, lost or formatted files from Mac.
Follow these simple steps using AnyRecover to get your files back!
Get Ready!
First, download and install AnyRecover, following on-screen prompts to accomplish the task.
AnyRecover 20% off Coupon Code: ANY-ART-D20
Don't miss the opportunity to get AnyRecover license at the lowest price on the market. Don't know how to apply it, check the instructions here:
Get Set!
1. After loading AnyRecover, plug your external hard drive into your Mac directly or via USB.
2. Next select the drive under 'External Removable Devices' tab, click 'Start' to begin scanning lost files on the drive.
Go!
1. AnyRecover takes a moment to scan your drive. Once done, it will list out all scanning results by file type.
2. Double click a single file to preview it before recovery.
3. Select the files and press Recover to get them back.
What If?
Best External Hard Disk Drives
What if my files were not found? Fear not. We can take this a step further. Enable 'Deep Scan' to try one more time, follow the steps above just as before to locate and recover your files.
It is plain to see that AnyRecover for Mac is a tool worthy of top shelf treatment in your arsenal of items that are used to defend, recover and keep your system up and running. Don't get caught without the file you need for that meeting or stumbling looking for baby photos that were stored on disk and suddenly 'hid' from your view. Allow AnyRecover to find and recover your lost files. AnyRecover is easy to use but provides sophisticated results that mean you know what you're doing!
David Miller April 2, 2007 TutorialsMac
If you're into preventative maintenance and creating backups like we are, you'll need to create a Mac start up disk image. It's an indispensable tool – one which could save your data and prevent a lot of headaches down the road. This how-to will show you how to make an image of one hard drive and store it on another drive. This image will be compressed and will make recovery fast and easy. You will need an additional volume or a mounted shared drive with enough space to create the image.
There are two ways to create these images: Using Disk Utility or using the hdiutil and asr commands in the terminal. We'll talk about the GUI disk utility version first, and then we'll discuss the CLI and automated version. It is best to create an image from a drive that is not booted at the time. You can image an active boot drive, but try to stop or quit any services and applications to make sure there is minimal writing to the hard drive while the image is being created. Here's how to make a Mac start up disk image using Disk Utility:
Launch the Disk Utility application. It's located in Applications > Utilities.
From the File menu, select New > Disk Image from Folder.
Select the drive you want to image. Click the Image button.
Name your new disc image. From the Image Format menu, select Compressed.
Once the disc image is created, it will appear in the left pane in the Disk Utility application. Click once on the image. From the Images menu, select Scan image for Restore.
To restore a disc image back to a hard drive, click once on the image in the left pane. Select the Restore tab. Drag the image file from the left pane to the Source box. Drag the partition you want to restore to from the left pane to the Destination box. Check both the Erase Destination and Skip Checksum checkboxes. Click the Restore button.
Creating Disk Images with hdiutil and asr
Use External Hard Drive As Startup Disk Macos
Below, you'll find a simple script that will create a ready-to-restore image. The disc image will be created with the date in the name. The only thing you will need to change is the part that says extdisk – change this to the name of the second partition or share you will save the image to.
External Mac Disk Drive
You can use cron to make full disk image backups. For example, you can create a cron job that images Macintosh HD to another drive called Backup Images every Sunday at 3 AM. Edit cron using the following command in the terminal:
sudo pico /etc/crontab
Add this line, but substitute /path_to_image_script with the real path to the shell script from above:
00 3 * * 7 root sh /path_to_image_script
Press Control+O to save. Press the return key. Press Control+X to exit the pico editor.
We have a few servers running either Mac OS 10.4 client or 10.4 server. Using the above method is how we backup the system partition. We only use the system partition for boot and server settings, and this makes the partition quite small and fast to image. The boot partition on our servers never grows larger than 3GB, because there are no additional files taking up space. Besides the weekly image that is automatically created by cron and a script, we also create an image right before applying any patches or updates. This process is so fast that we can restore a system image in less than ten minutes after a cold boot off an external startup disk. We have successfully used this on a few occasions, when an Apple update broke something.
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