Type diskpart into the Command Prompt window and press Enter.
To do this on Windows 8 or Windows 7, press the Windows key once, type cmd, and press Ctrl+Shift+Enter. Next, open a Command Prompt window as administrator.
For example, in the screenshot below, the Mac-formatted drive is Disk 2. Your Mac keeps stuff in its memory when you use your drive. Be sure to Eject before you pull your USB cable. After you have copied what you want to your drive. Eject Your Seagate Drive When You’re Finished. First, note the number of the disk in the disk management window. And in a few seconds your Mac will show your Seagate external hard drive on your Mac’s desktop. This process erases everything on the disk, including its files and all its partitions. To erase this partition, we’ll have to wipe the entire disk. This partition is marked as protected, so you can’t just right-click and delete it - the delete option will be disabled. The Mac drive may have an “EFI System Partition” on it.
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. Can you tell me how to format an external hard drive for Mac and PC compatibility so that I can easily access or. If you’re lucky, you can just right-click each partition on the Mac drive and select Delete Volume to remove the partitions. 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. Locate the Mac drive in the list of disks. This tool allows you to manage the partitions on drives connected to your computer - internal ones or external ones connected via USB. Press Windows Key + R to open the Run dialog, type diskmgmt.msc into the box, and press Enter to open it. Select the hard drive, disk, or backup volume that you want to remove from Time Machine backups, then click on Remove Disk. Go to the Time Machine system preference panel, then scroll down in the drive list to find Add or Remove Backup Disk and click that. RELATED: Understanding Hard Drive Partitioning with Disk Managementįirst, open the Windows Disk Management tool. Pull down the Apple menu and choose ‘System Preferences’. You’ll probably want to uninstall Java when you’re done.Įrase the Mac Partitions, Including the EFI System Partition
HFSExplorer unfortunately requires you install Java to use it, but it’s the only free option here. If you only have Windows systems available, you can use HFSExplorer to copy files from the drive onto your Windows system drive or another drive. If you have a Mac lying around, you can plug the drive into a Mac and back up the files. Instead, we’ll just be wiping the drive and starting over from scratch. This process won’t actually convert the file system. the remedy is to tell windows to hide them as well.First, back up the data on the Mac-formatted drive if you have anything important on it. if you delete them osx will just put them back. these files take up almost no space on the drive at all and they help osx recognize the drive.
when you are using an external for both systems, osx will put a ton of files on the drive that wont show up on your mac but itll look like a lot of clutter on windows. two reasons: one) time machine requires a backup drive to be formatted to osx extended journaled (cant use it on a windows if its formatted this way) two) regardless of if the drive is in osx extended journaled time machine still wont share a drive with any other use cases. i personally prefer western digital for external hard drives as they typically last me longer than competitors that ive tried.Īlso no, you cant have a time machine backup on that same drive. exfat works on both windows and mac and will allow for the transport of large files. Any external drive can be formatted to exfat within disc utility.