How to format your hard drive Seagate branded external drives come preformatted, some for PCs, some for Macs, and some of them have special utilities allowing them to work between both without formatting. Seagate internal drives must be formatted before use. Drives that will be bootable are formatted during the process of installing the operating system (ie, Windows or MacOS). Drives that will be used for storage can be formatted according to the instructions below.
Or, if you have a drive that is formatted for a different type of computer or a drive that is not preformatted, you will need to format the drive before you can use it. Formatting erases all data on the drive. So if you are formatting a drive that has already been used, be sure to copy any files you will ever want to see again onto a computer or backup drive. For instructions on how to format your hard drive on a Mac, please reference the following links: Formatting your drive in Windows • To open the Disk Management press and hold the Windows key ( ) + ( R ) • Type compmgmt.msc • If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation. • In the pane on the left, under Storage, click Disk Management. • If the drive is secondary storage and hasn't been initialized previously you may be prompted to initialize the disk first. Note: MBR for drives under 2TB and GPT for drives over 2TB • The drive should say unallocated Note: If it does not you will need to right-click and delete the volume first.
If the external hard drive is pre formatted for Mac, Disk Management will list 3 partitions and you will not be able to delete the 'Health (EFI System Partition)' because it's a protected partition. I've downloaded microsoft for mac, how do i partition. To delete this partition you have to use Microsoft Diskpart Erase utility. Please see the instructions.
• Right-click and select new simple volume • Click next 3 times • Type the name of the drive in “Volume Label” • Make sure quick format is selected • Click next then finished See more information at the.
What is HFSExplorer? HFSExplorer is an application that can read Mac-formatted hard disks and disk images. It can read the file systems HFS (Mac OS Standard), HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) and HFSX (Mac OS Extended with case sensitive file names). HFSExplorer allows you to browse your Mac volumes with a graphical file system browser, extract files (copy to hard disk), view detailed information about the volume and create disk images from the volume.
Portable FireWire drives provide the fastest transfer rate, and are widely available. However, unless the PC has a FireWire port, which is not common on PC computers, you will not be able to use a portable FireWire hard drive. A portable USB hard drive can be used if no FireWire port is available on your old PC. CD or DVD burner. Creating a backup disc of the files on your PC is one of the easiest methods you can use to transfer any amount of data. If you double-click on the drive, it will open just like a normal Windows drive. If there is any file that is Mac-specific, it will also show an apple icon next to it. Now you can copy data from the Mac formatted drive to your Windows PC and vice versa. It works perfectly and I didn’t run into a single issue.