Format Flash Drive For Use On Mac And Pc

Format

What is the best file system for USB or external hard drive on Mac?

Windows and Mac OS X use different file systems. Windows uses NTFS and Mac can't write files to volumes with NTFS format.

So, if you want to use a USB flash drive or an external hard drive with NTFS format on Mac, you should first reformat the devices to the Mac OS Extended file system. It is the best way to ensure full Mac compatibility of a new external hard drive or flash disk.

Connect the USB drive with the.iso file to your Mac system. From “Disk Utility,” click on your USB drive. Click on “Disk Image” and then on the “.” icon and select the.iso file that you have downloaded. Select “USB Drive” from the drop-down menu in front of “Type” and also select the name of your USB drive. By default, USB flash drives and external storage are formatted with the NTFS file system - this works flawlessly on PCs, while Mac computers are able to read data in the format, but struggle to write using this type of storage. Format USB drive for Mac and PC via freeware AOMEI Partition Assistant, a free powerful format tool, is specially designed for Windows operating systems. It can support almost all file systems including Ext2, Ext3, NTFS, FAT32,exFAT, etc. You can use it to format USB drive quickly and securely.

Usually, FAT32 which can be read and wrote on Mac is recommended for maximum compatibility. And if you need to transfer files larger than 4 GB between Macs and Windows computers, exFAT or MS-DOS (FAT) is better.

How to format USB flash drive or external hard drive for Mac

Mac
  1. How to format a usb flash drive on a windows 10 pc for mac os x & windows pc compatibility If you need to transfer files larger than 4 GB between macs and wi.
  2. Format an External Disk or a Flash Drive for Mac using Disk Utility in OS X El Capitan and macOS Siera. Formatting an external disk or flash drive in macOS Sierra is little different that formatting it in Mavericks and lower versions of OS X. Disk Utility was changed with the release of OS X El Capitan.

But how can you format USB flash drive or external hard drive for Mac? Don’t worry! This page will show you two ways to do this job:

Format USB or external hard drive for Mac using Mac disk utility
Format USB or external hard drive for Mac on Windows PC using third-party USB format tool

Format Flash Drive For Mac And Pc 2018

Now, you can follow these two solutions to format any hard drive, flash drive, USB drive, SSD or any other external storage drive so as to make them work on your Mac now.

Method 1. Format USB or external hard drive for Mac using Mac Disk utility

Windows offers users built-in disk management tool to create, delete, resize, merge and format partitions. You can try the following steps to format USB or external hard drive for Mac with Disk Utility on Mac.

  1. 1. Connect the USB or external hard drive to your Mac computer.
  2. 2. Launch the Disk Utility by clicking 'Applications' > 'Utilities'.
  1. 3. Locate and click on your USB or external hard drive in Disk Utility and then click on 'Erase'.
Format
  1. 4. Next to 'Format', click the contextual menu and select 'Mac OS Extended (Journaled)'.
  2. 5. Reset the drive name and click 'Erase', confirm the operation on the next pop-up window.

Flash Drives For Mac Computers

  1. Wait for the process to complete and then you'll get compatible HFS+ file system on your external hard drive or USB, which will make your device compatible and workable on your Mac.

Method 2. Format USB or external hard drive for Mac using third-party USB format tool on a Windows PC

If you need a simpler format tool to format USB or external hard drive to FAT32 to make them work on Mac, you can apply a third-party format tool to format them on Windows PC. EaseUS partition software is a popular disk partition management tool which is available for all hard disk related jobs such as format disk partition, extend system partition, settle low disk space problem.

Now you can try it to format USB or external hard drive on your Windows PC by following the steps below. If you stored important data on the USB or external hard drive, you can try this tool to convert NTFS to FAT32 without formatting.

Step 1. Launch EaseUS Partition Master, right-click the partition on your external hard drive/USB/SD card which you want to format and choose the 'Format' option.

Step 2. Assign a new partition label, file system (NTFS/FAT32/EXT2/EXT3), and cluster size to the selected partition, then click 'OK'.

Formatting flash drive on mac

Step 3. In the Warning window, click 'OK' to continue.

Step 4. Click the 'Execute Operation' button in the top-left corner to review the changes, then click 'Apply' to start formatting your external hard drive/USB/SD card.

Format Flash Drive For Use On Mac And Pc

After this, you can connect your external hard drive/USB to Mac computer and use it to save data by then.

Formatting Flash Drive On Mac

If you're moving it between Mac and Windows, you want to format your flash drive with the FAT32 filesystem. It shouldn't matter whether you format it on your Mac or on a Windows machine.
To do it on the Mac, plug in the flash drive, and open Disk Utility (in your /Applications/Utilities folder). The drive should appear in the list on the left of the DU window.
Select the drive, then click the Erase tab. On that tab, select MS-DOS (FAT) as the volume format, choose a disk name if you want to, then click Erase, and wait.
That said, if your drive just 'didn't work any more' after a while, it may be faulty and it's possible that re-formatting it won't help. (All flash drives do have a finite number of read/write cycles before they don't work reliably any more, too, although it's unlikely you've reached that limit through normal usage.)

Format Hard Drive For Mac And Pc

Aug 23, 2008 1:22 PM