- #MAC FORMAT USB FOR MAC AND WINDOWS HOW TO#
- #MAC FORMAT USB FOR MAC AND WINDOWS FOR MAC OS#
- #MAC FORMAT USB FOR MAC AND WINDOWS FOR MAC#
- #MAC FORMAT USB FOR MAC AND WINDOWS MAC OS X#
Right-click on the drive you want to format, select Format to see the list of configurations including file system. Press Win+X, then hit K key to open Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc). Option 2: Format a USB drive as EexFAT in Disk Management. Under File system box, select exFAT for this drive. Right-click on the drive you want to format, click on Format. Press Windows logo key + E to open File Explorer. Option 1: Format a USB drive as EexFAT in This PC. Note: If you have important data on your USB flash drive, you should backup your drive before formatting it. There are several ways to format drive in Windows PC, you can do that in This PC or in Disk Management.
#MAC FORMAT USB FOR MAC AND WINDOWS HOW TO#
How to format a USB flash drive as exFAT on Windows PC Be sure to eject the disk before you remove it from your Mac. This will erase all the files on the drive. Click the Erase button when you are done and the Disk Utility will format your disk with the settings you specified. Then select the default GUID Partition Map (GPT) scheme. You will be asked to provide the disk name and then select the file system as exFAT. If you have a USB flash drive inserted in your Mac, you can see it under the External in the Disk Utility. Go to Open Disk Utility, which is located under Applications in the Finder menu. To format a drive on a Mac, you'll need the built-in Disk Utility application. You will see the drive's file system shown on the right “Format”.įormatting a drive will erase it completely, so make sure you have everything backed up that you want to keep. Right-click the drive icon in the Finder sidebar (or on the desktop) and select Get Info. The other formatsContents 1 How to Format USB Drive for.
#MAC FORMAT USB FOR MAC AND WINDOWS FOR MAC#
So how do you know if your USB drive is in the correct format? You do not need to do anything special on the "Disk Utility" - simply insert the USB drive and open Finder. USB Format For Mac And PC To share a USB drive between a Mac and a Windows PC, there are two disk formats to choose from: exFAT and FAT32. How to format a USB drive as exFAT on Mac Part 2: Format a USB drive as exFAT on Windows.This is because not all file systems for USB’s are compatible. Part 1: Format a USB drive as exFAT on Mac Usb drives are great and portable, but they don’t always work on every type of computer.You can format the drive on your Mac or Windows computer. If you plan on using an external drive with both Macs and PCs, you should format the disk with the exFAT file system instead. This tutorial will show you how to create a Windows To Go USB drive that supports Mac computers, then you can run Windows to go on a Mac computer to complete the work that must be done under Windows.
By default, Macs use HFS, while PCs use NTFS, which are not compatible with each other. Since the PC and Mac are two different operating systems, they use different file systems.
#MAC FORMAT USB FOR MAC AND WINDOWS FOR MAC OS#
Tuxera (who develop one of the commercial NTFS drivers for Mac OS X) have a list of free NTFS drivers that are developed from the same NTFS-3G source used by Linux to read NTFS drives.How to Format a USB Drive as exFAT for Mac and Windows Compatibility
For a while I've been using but as far as I can tell it hasn't been updated since December 2008. I'd love for someone to tell me differently.
#MAC FORMAT USB FOR MAC AND WINDOWS MAC OS X#
There are a few third-party products that allow Mac OS X to read NTFS formatted drives but as far as I'm aware the free ones aren't as well maintained as the commercial ones. Mac OS X has had support for reading NTFS formatted disk for a few versions, but still doesn't have write support. The default GUID partitioning scheme won't be recognised by 32-bit Windows XP and earlier Windows operating systems and Mac OS X versions earlier than 10.4. FAT32 (called MS-DOS (FAT) by Disk Utility a filesystem originally released in 1977 and updated a few times since, lastly in 1996) really is the only cross platform filesystem that is going to work fully out of the box with Windows and Mac OS X.īe careful though, if you are using Disk Utility to format the drive, you should make sure to choose the Master Boot Record partitioning scheme (hit the "Options." button below the "Partition Layout" control on the Partition pane).