Mobile Computing News

Photo: Western Digital

So you’ve just picked up your fancy Western Digital external hard drive and you want it to start putting in work, but it isn’t formatted properly or, even worse, formatted at all, what do you do? Here’s a dead simple guide to formatting an external hard drive using a Mac computer.

First: NTFS, FAT32, and Mac OS X

First things first, it is likely you want your hard drive to work on pretty much any computer you install it, right? Right! So you need to be careful to avoid compatibility issues across platforms by selecting the correct hard drive formatting procedure.

If you format your drive on a Mac OS X without selecting specific settings, only other Macs can read it – as in Windows won’t even see it. If you format your drive on a Windows OS using NTFS, you will have read-write issues on your Mac.

If, however you format your drive on Windows or Mac with FAT32, well you’re sorted – you can read and write data across both major desktop operating system platforms.

How to format your external hard drive using a Mac

Now to the actual hard drive formatting procedure: remember, when formatting a drive, you will lose all the data you may have on their (if any), so make sure to back it up if its important to you.

Now, formatting an external hard drive on the Mac for use on Windows and Mac is a dead simple eight step plan:

Step 1 – Plug in your drive, naturally.

Step 2 – Select Finder > Application > Utilities

Step 3 – Double click the Disk Utility application

Step 4 – Within the Disk Utility app, select the drive you’re formatting in the left hand column

Step 5 – Select the erase tab

Step 6 – Now at the ‘Volume Format’ option, select ‘MS-DOS File System’. This is basically the FAT32 disk type that will let your drive work on both Windows and Mac machines.

Step 7 – You’ll be asked to confirm you’re formatting for both Mac and Windows, followed by an erase prompt. Select that erase prompt. (Warning: this data will be gone if you have not backed it up so make sure to back it up first!)

Step 8 – you’ll be asked to confirm that you really do want to perform the erase procedure. Select the erase button again to affirm that you do want to.

When you know what to do, hard drive formatting isn’t nearly as difficult as it may seem, and we hope this guide has made the process as dead simple as it really is.