- Lacie Hard Drive Format For Mac And Pc
- Format Hard Drive Disk Utility
- Mac Format Hard Drive On Windows
- Mac Format Hard Drive Ntfs
- Mac-formatted external hard drives are often priced higher than their Windows counterparts and are not as widely available. You can repurpose any hard drive to work with your Mac. Macs running OS 10.5 and higher - Leopard to Yosemite - include the Disk Utility program that allows users to check and repair disks and drives and to format.
- These will format the drive in OS X's HFS+ filetype so it will be compatible with Time Machine. Click Erase and OS X will format the drive. With the drive selected in Disk Utility, click.
Open Disk Management, the hard drive manager included with all versions of Windows. Format Hard Drive (Mac) 1. Connect the external hard drive to the computer. Click Go on the top tool bar, and select Utilities. Open Disk Utility. Select the external hard drive on the left-hand side. Click the Partition tab. Change the Partition Layout from Current to 1 Partition.
Format Any External Hard Drive for an Apple Mac | Tutorial with Images
So you’re shopping for a new hard drive for your mac but you noticed a few things on the box.
- Some don’t specify they are Apple Mac Compatible
- The ones that say Apple compatible are sometimes more expensive
The great news is it does not matter which brand you buy. You can easily format the drive in a few simple steps that I will show you. I’ve even heard sales staff in shops try to up-sell a more expensive hard drive to customers because they used an Apple Mac.
How I Pick an External Hard Drive
Me personally, I shop based on hard disk drive size and price. Usually, but not always I get great deals on Western Digital Drives or Seagate external hard drives. Whatever is the least expensive with the biggest capacity is the one I will get.
No Mention of Mac Compatibility on the Box? No Problems!
I just purchased a Seagate 2TB Expansion drive from a local office supplies store. One the side of the box it says “Compatible with Windows”. There’s no mention of Apple anywhere on the side. This means the disk is pre-formatted so you can plug it into a PC and it will just work fine. The great news is we can re-format the disk to work for mac in 8 easy steps listed below.
How to format any drive to work with an Apple Mac in 8 Easy Steps
STEP 1: Unbox the hard drive and plug this side of the cable into the hard drive.
STEP 2: Plug the blue USB connection (below) into a free port on the computer. The blue color denotes that this hard drive is USB 3.0 Speed. If your cable is plain black it could be a USB 2.0-speed drive. It doesn’t matter either way for storage usage. USB 3.0 is faster to transfer files but it’s not a big deal.
Once you have the hard drive plugged in you can see it come up on the Desktop
If you double click inside the drive you see files already in the drive. This is usually the case for any Windows drive because it comes with free software we don’t even need. Let me show you how to format this drive properly for Mac.
STEP 3: Click on the Launchpad Icon from the Task Bar
STEP 4: Start Typing “Disk” and “Disk Utilities” will come up. Click on the Disk Utilities Icon
STEP 5: You are now presented with the Apple Mac Disk Utility Tool. Click on the new hard drive you just installed. Usually, it has the name of the brand on the drive. As you can see below the new drive in my case is called Seagate Expansion. If you purchased a WD drive it will say Western Digital or WD for example.
STEP 6: After selecting the proper drive click the “Erase” button at the top of this same view.
Easy install no soldering needed. Unlock Mac EFI in just a few seconds with EFI Chip Card. – Fix Corrupted BIOS Firmware – Firmware Unlock, iCloud Removal – Remove MDM, DEP Profile. For MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, Mac Pro, and Mac mini 2010 – 2017. MacOS provides multiple methods to protect the data on a Mac: a user account password, encryption via FileVault, and optional low-level security measure that prevents starting up from storage devices other than the selected startup disk.That's known as the firmware password or EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) lock, which will also block the user's ability to use all startup key combinations. Mac mini (Mid 2011) with Intel graphics: Macmini5,1: MM51.0077.B12 (2015-001) Mac mini Server (Mid 2010) Macmini4,1: MM41.0042.B03 (EFI 1.5) Mac mini (Mid 2010) Macmini4,1: MM41.0042.B03 (EFI 1.5) Mac mini (Early 2009) Macmini3,1: MM31.0081.B06 (EFI 1.2) Mac mini (Late 2006) Macmini1,1: MM11.0055.B08 (EFI 1.1) 1.3f4 (SMC 1.0) Mac mini (Early. Efi for mac mini. To be safe, be sure that you have the latest EFI (which is like a BIOS but for Apple computers) for your Mac Mini. First check to ensure your efi is the latest here. For some users, the efi update never installed because of an issue with Snow Leopard 10.6.8 so, if this applies to you, first download this file and install it. However, if you are running one of the 16 Mac models identified by Duo Labs, there is a chance that your system hasn’t received any EFI update at all: iMac 7,1 to 10,1, MacBook 5,1.
STEP 7: After clicking Erase on the prior step you are greeted with this popup. You can now rename the drive easily to anything you like. For my use I am calling it YouTube 2019 as I will be storing all the new video files I produce on this drive.
STEP 8: This step is critical or it won’t work. Please use the format drop-down menu and click MAC OS Extended (Journaled). Next click Erase
Disk Utilities will go through the following steps automatically:
Once you see the Green Tick you are all done! ✅
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Congratulations! You have now formatted your new external Hard Drive to work with your Apple Mac running Mojave.
Please Remember:
This is the process for formatting any External Hard Disk Drive to work with an Apple Mac running OS Mojave or High Sierra. The process is also the same for the MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iMac Pro, iMac, and MacMini computers.
It doesn’t matter what brand of hard drive you buy. It all comes down to the formatting applied to the drive. This process will work for Solid State (SSD) drives as well as any other hard disk drive not pre-formatted for Apple Mac. There’s no need to spend the extra dollars on a drive that is pre-formatted. Once you have done this once the process is so simple I’m sure you’ll now be able to show your friends how to do the same exact thing as this article.
If this tutorial is helpful please share it with anyone who might require help with this topic.
Related
Most users use Disk Utility to erase a disk or hard drive. But some Mac users might need to erase them from the command line on Mac OS. To do that, the only thing you need is a bit of precise syntax to make sure that you are erasing the proper disk.
Here I'll show you how you can erase and format a disk using the command line.
Lacie Hard Drive Format For Mac And Pc
Working with Terminal
Start off by running the following command in the command line: Diskutil list
This is going to list all the mounted drives on your Mac.
Format Hard Drive Disk Utility
Once you have found the proper drive to erase, just copy its identifier so you can use it for the next command. Then pick a name and a system format type. This is the syntax we need: Diskutil eraseDisk FILESYSTEM DISKNAME DISKIDENTIFIER
Let’s say the disk I want to erase has “/dev/disk5s2” as its identifier and I’m going to use Mac OS Extended Journaled (JHFS+) as the system format type and name it “Empty”. The syntax is going to look like this: Diskutil eraseDisk JHFS+ Empty /dev/disk5s2
It’s important to keep in mind that if you run the eraseDisk command, the target disk is going to lose all its data, so make sure you are erasing the proper disk.
Mac Format Hard Drive On Windows
If you need different system format types, here are a few references you could use instead of JHFS+:
Mac Format Hard Drive Ntfs
- Mac OS Extended: HFS+
- MS-DOS fat32: FAT32
- ExFAT: ExFAT