• Format A Drive For Mac Os X And Windows
• How To Format A Hard Drive For Both Mac And Windows
• Format Mac Drive In Windows

If you want to transfer files from a Mac to Windows PC and vice versa using an external portable hard drive then you have to have the external drive formatted in a file system both OS's can read.

Last updated on January 3rd, 2017 at 11:47 am. When you work (or live) in an environment that consists of both Mac and Windows computers, it becomes a constant headache negotiating the different filesystems and their compatibility. First, there is the lack of NTFS write capability on Mac’s.

Then there is the inability to write files greater than 4gb on Fat32 and of course the complete lack of support on Windows for a Mac drive formatted with HFS+. There are two answers. One is to use a paid 3rd party tool to add NTFS write support to a Mac, such as tool. The other is to format your drives with the exFAT file system.

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This file system can be read and written by both Mac and Windows with support for single files of up to 128 petabytes! Even better, it’s freely included in both operating systems. A drive can be formatted with exFAT using either a Windows or a Mac computer. From what I understand, Windows doesn’t always like the way Mac’s do the formatting on some larger drives, though, so give it a try and if your Windows machines don’t like it, just format the drive with Windows. If you need to be sure without the time to test it, it is best to do the formatting on Windows since there don’t appear to be any compatibility problems that way. So how do you do it?

First, make sure anything important from the drive has been backed up. You don’t want to accidentally lose it when you format the drive.

How to update a mac. FAT32 (called MS-DOS (FAT) by Disk Utility; a filesystem originally released in 1977 and updated a few times since, lastly in 1996) really is the only cross platform filesystem that is going to work fully out of the box with Windows and Mac OS X. Be careful though, if you are using Disk Utility to format the drive, you should make sure to choose the Master Boot Record partitioning scheme (hit the 'Options.' Button below the 'Partition Layout' control on the Partition pane). The default GUID partitioning scheme won't be recognised by 32-bit Windows XP and earlier Windows operating systems and Mac OS X versions earlier than 10.4. Mac OS X has had support for reading NTFS formatted disk for a few versions, but still doesn't have write support.

There are a few third-party products that allow Mac OS X to read NTFS formatted drives but as far as I'm aware the free ones aren't as well maintained as the commercial ones. I'd love for someone to tell me differently. For a while I've been using but as far as I can tell it hasn't been updated since December 2008.

Tuxera (who develop one of the commercial NTFS drivers for Mac OS X) have a list of free NTFS drivers that are developed from the same NTFS-3G source used by Linux to read NTFS drives. My answer from a similar question: If you're working exclusively with 10.6.6 or greater on the Mac side, try. Native read/write support under Windows and OS X, and none of the file size limits of FAT32. Disk Utility will happily format your drives using it.

Format A Drive For Mac Os X And Windows

It's probably your best option, as it avoids any user-space filesystem drivers, which personally make me a bit uneasy. XP and Vista support exFAT with appropriate updates: Vista as of SP1, and XP with SP2 and the Also a good point from the above posters re: MBR vs. GPT on 32bit systems. NTFS is a better filesystem than fat32 and is well supported by many OSes. OSX has several approach accessing NTFS read-write.

How To Format A Hard Drive For Both Mac And Windows

The open-source solution is to install ntfs-3g with macports, and modify your system's auto-mount script. The disk can be formatted with windows, or with ntfsprogs on a mac. ( filesystem operations always envolve risk, and very likely lots of command-line work.) NTFS is the native windows filesystem. It's open-source drivers work quite stably and reliably.

Format Mac Drive In Windows

NTFS will work like a charm if you'll ever need linux support. If you don't feel comfortable altering the system yourself, paid softwares and services can always be found. I can post my ntfs auto-mount script for mac if you can't find one with google.