I once reformatted my Samsung M3 Portable (1TB) hard drive to Mac only so I could not use it in Windows PCs anymore. It has been a year now so I tried to research how to reset it back to work with Windows and Mac and came across your article. How to stop checking for updates windows 10. I followed your steps and to be honest with you it was very easy and it worked great, however there is a catch. I have Mac 10.11.6 El Capitan and the disk utility looks a bit different.

If you simply want to have a data drive that can be shared across Mac and PC just format the drive in ExFAT. External drives come partitioned, you simply want to reformat it with an ExFAT partition. Just make sure you are using SP1 or later in Vista to enable ExFAT.

When you try to erase it, the ‘scheme’ is set to OS X Extended (Journaled). Now if you want it to work in Windows and Mac, You need to select ExFat and then under the scheme you need to select ‘Master Boot Record’. Still your article was very helpful. Kind regards.

Nowadays, when you buy a USB drive, you can use it right out of the box with your Mac. However, unless it’s been designed for use with a Mac, it won’t be formatted using macOS’ preferred file system (either Mac OS Extended or APFS, depending on which version of macOS you’re running). That’s because most of the computers in the world run Windows, and Windows uses a different file system, usually one known as Fat32. Drives formatted as Fat32 can be read from and written to by macOS, but it’s not optimal and you’re more likely to run into problems than if you use macOS’ native format. So, if you’ve bought a USB drive that’s formatted as Fat32, or any other format other than Mac OS Extended (also known as HFS+) or APFS, here’s how to format a USB drive on Mac. It’s exactly the same procedure if you need to reformat a flash drive on a Mac.

How to format a USB drive on a Mac 1. Plug the drive into a USB socket (if you have a recent MacBook or MacBook Pro that only has USB-C connectors, you’ll need a USB-C to USB-A adaptor). Open a new Finder window and click on the drive. Make sure it has no files on it that you need. The process of reformatting it will wipe all the data from it. Once you’ve copied any files you need from the USB drive to your Mac, go to Applications>Utilities and double-click on Disk Utility. Click on the USB drive in the sidebar and then choose Erase from the toolbar at the top of the window.

In the window that drops down type a name for the formatted drive in the box next to Name. Choose a format from the dropdown menu. If you have previously stored sensitive data on the drive, click the Security tab. Choose a security level using the slider. The further to the right you move the slider, the more ‘passes’ the erase tool will make and the more securely files will be deleted.

However, it also increases the time it takes to format the drive quite considerably. Click Ok then click Erase. Model to layout autocad. Tip: You don’t need to erase a whole drive to delete files securely. If you have confidential files or sensitive data you need to remove from your Mac completely, you should use File Shredder.

It’s specifically designed to securely delete sensitive data and will render it unrecoverable. You can download CleanMyMac X for free. Which format to choose? If your Mac is running macOS High Sierra or later, you have two options for file formats: APFS and Mac OS Extended. Which should you choose?

The key point is that disks formatted as APFS won’t be recognized by Macs running versions of macOS older than High Sierra. So if you think you might need to plug the USB drive into a Mac running an older version of macOS, format it as Mac OS Extended. APFS is optimized for SSD (solid state drive) such as flash drives, so if you reformat a flash drive on a Mac, you should definitely choose APFS (unless you plan to use it with a pre-High Sierra Mac, of course). Even on hard drives, however, APFS is faster and more reliable than Mac OS Extended.