How to Reformat a Hard Drive to Work on a Mac & a PC

If you use both Windows based PCs and Mac computers you probably have discovered you can't use most external hard drives on both devices. This is due to the formatting of the drive. If you want to use the hard drive on both computer systems, you need to reformat the drive. Of course, before you do so, back up the contents. When you format the computer, it loses all of the content currently stored on the system.

Instructions

1. Connect the external hard drive to your Mac computer via USB cable. Plug the USB cable into the back of the external hard drive, then insert the other cable into an available USB port on the Mac.

2. Launch "Disk Utilities" on the system. If you are not sure where it is, open "Finder," select "Mac HD," "Applications," "Utilities" and finally "Disk Utility."

3. Select the external hard drive you connected from the left side of the Disk Utility application.

4. Click "Erase" from the middle of the program screen. Click the pull-down arrow next to "Drive Format" and select "FAT." This is the format you need to use the drive on both Macs and PCs.

5. Select "Erase" twice and the computer formats the drive. Due to drive regulations on the FAT formatting, you can't write files larger than 4GB to the system.

References

• CNET: Format Drive to Work on Mac and PC