I have a SanDisk Cruser drive that was formatted for a Mac and now I want to use it for a PC (and I don't have access to the Mac. What can I do?
Back Up the Drive’s Data First First, back up the data on the Mac-formatted drive if you have anything important on it. This process won’t actually convert the file system.
Instead, we’ll just be wiping the drive and starting over from scratch. Any files on the drive will be erased. If you have a Mac lying around, you can plug the drive into a Mac and back up the files.
If you only have Windows systems available, you can use to copy files from the drive onto your Windows system drive or another drive. HFSExplorer unfortunately requires you install Java to use it, but it’s the only free option here. You’ll probably want to. Erase the Mac Partitions, Including the EFI System Partition RELATED: First, open the.
Press Windows Key + R to open the Run dialog, type diskmgmt.msc into the box, and press Enter to open it. This tool allows you to manage the partitions on drives connected to your computer — internal ones or external ones connected via USB. Locate the Mac drive in the list of disks. Be sure you’ve identified the Mac drive — if you accidentally delete partitions from another drive, you could damage your Windows installation or lose your files.
If you’re lucky, you can just right-click each partition on the Mac drive and select Delete Volume to remove the partitions. You can then right-click in the empty space and select New Simple Volume to create a partition and format it with the Windows NTFS or FAT32 file systems.
The Mac drive may have an “EFI System Partition” on it. This partition is marked as protected, so you can’t just right-click and delete it — the delete option will be disabled. To erase this partition, we’ll have to wipe the entire disk. This process erases everything on the disk, including its files and all its partitions. First, note the number of the disk in the disk management window. For example, in the screenshot below, the Mac-formatted drive is Disk 2.
Next, open a Command Prompt window as administrator. To do this on Windows 8 or Windows 7, press the Windows key once, type cmd, and press Ctrl+Shift+Enter. Type diskpart into the Command Prompt window and press Enter. Type list disk at the DISKPART prompt and press Enter to view a list of disks connected to your computer. Identify the number of your Mac disk in the list.
It should be the same as the number of the disk in the Disk Management window. Be sure to double-check this — you could accidentally wipe the wrong drive if you select the wrong disk here. Type select disk # and press Enter to select the Mac disk, replacing # with the number of the Mac disk.
For example, here we’d type select disk 2. Finally, type clean and press Enter. This command erases the entire selected disk, including all its files and partitions — whether they’re protected or not. You’ll have an empty, uninitialized disk after you do this. Close the Command Prompt window when you see a message saying “DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk.” Create an NTFS or FAT32 Partition You can now open the Disk Management window again.
If you’ve left it open, you may have to click Action Rescan Disks to update the data. Locate the Mac disk in the list. It will be completely empty and display a message saying “Not Initialized.” Right-click it and select Initialize Disk. Select the and click OK to create a partition table for the disk. Right-click in the unallocated space on the initialized disk and select New Simple Volume.
Use the wizard to create a partition with the. The drive will now be formatted for use by Windows systems. There will be no space wasted by protected Mac partitions. Some Mac functions require an HFS+ formatted drive. For example, can only back up to HFS+ formatted drives. Image Credit.
How to Format External Drive using EXFAT for Mac & Windows Compatibility Due to PCs and Macs are two different operating systems, they use different file systems. By default, Macs are with the HFS+ (since 2017 there's new Apple File System, APFS, optimized for flash storage), while PCs are with NTFS and they're incompatible with each other. 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 format the drive to work with both Windows and Mac can read and write too. Generally, there are two choice that is by using the FAT32 and exFAT file system. In this guide we're using exFAT instead of FAT32, because FAT32 has a maximum 4GB file size limit whereas exFAT can work with files as large as 16EB (exabytes).
EXFAT also performs better than FAT32. You can machine.
However, if you want to use part of the drive for OS X's Time Machine backups, you should do this from the Mac. How to Format External Drive on Mac Most External drives you by will automatically be formatted in NTFS, which is a Windows file system. Macs can only read but not write to a NTFS file system. So if you want your external hard drive to be backward compatible with both OS's then you need to reformat it with FAT32 OR exFAT. You format USB flash drive in built-in Disk Utility application.
Here's how to launch Disk Utility. Press Command+Space to open the Spotlight, type Disk Utility, and press Return to launch the app. You can also open a Finder window, select Applications in the sidebar, and head to Utilities Disk Utility. If there is a USB flash drive plugged into Mac, you can see it under External in the Disk Utility's sidebar. Select the drive. Click the Erase button to erase the entire drive and create a single partition on it.
You'll be asked to provide a name for the disk, and choose the file systems. For external drives, it almost always makes sense to format in exFAT. Then select the default GUID Partition Map (GPT) scheme. Click the E rase button when you're done and the Disk Utility will format your disk with the settings you specified. This will erase all the files on the drive. Before you remove the drive, click the eject icon to the right of the disk in the Finder or Disk Utility windows. How to Format External/USB Drive on Windows PC There are several ways to format drive in Windows PC, you can do that in This PC or in Disk Management.
Option 1: Format External Drive in This PC 1. Press Windows logo key + E to open File Explorer. Right click on the drive you want to format, click on Format. Under File system box, select exFAT for this drive. Then click Start button to go on.
Option 2: Format External Drive in Disk Management 1. Press Win+X, then hit K key to open Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc). Right click on the drive you want to format, click on Format. Select exFAT for this drive. Then click OK button to go on.