Oct 13, 2017 - If you have a USB drive, and you plan to use it on both a Mac and PC, things. If your disk was initially formatted to NTFS on a PC (or HFS+ on a Mac). You should go ahead and format your storage drive with exFAT instead. Nov 15, 2018 - Since we're showing you how to use a hard drive with both Mac and PC. Unlike the older FAT32 format, however, ExFAT allows for the storage of files up to. Your PC can only write to the NTFS-formatted Windows partition.

Hello, Thank you for your response and sorry for late reply. In order to format a portable drive, i would suggest you to try following steps via Windows: • Connect your portable hard drive into the USB port on your computer. Close out of any windows that are open and click the ' Start' button on your Windows taskbar. Click ' Control Panel' on the right-hand side of the menu that populates. • Click the green text that reads 'System and Maintenance' in the window that opens. Click the 'Administrative Tools' link on the next screen that appears and double-click the 'Computer Management' icon in the 'Administrative Tools' window. • Enter the password for the Windows 'administrator account' if asked to do so by Windows.

Click 'Yes' to proceed if Windows asks you to verify that you would like to access the 'Administrative Tools • Click the text that reads 'Disk Management' underneath the 'Storage' heading located on the left-hand side of the screen. Locate and right-click the portable hard drive that you wish to format from the list that is shown. • Choose to format the portable hard disk drive by clicking the 'Format' button in the small gray menu that pops up. Confirm that you would like to format the portable HDD by clicking 'OK' and begin the process of formatting by clicking the 'OK' button on the next screen that appears. Windows will format the portable hard disk drive and notify you once the process has finished.

Please revert back with results. Regards, Jayant. Regards, Jayant Narang.

If you can’t see your USB drive in Explorer, search for “Create and format hard disk partitions” to open Windows’ Disk Management console. From here you can see all connected drives – even ones that aren’t currently usable in Windows.

If need be you can wipe your USB device and reformat it as required. How to format a USB drive on a Mac Step one To format a USB on a Mac, you can format your drive using Disk Utility. You’ll find this tool in your Applications folder, within the Utilities subfolder – or simply search Spotlight to find it (press Cmd+Space, then type its name). Step two When Disk Utility opens you’ll see a list of drives in the left-hand pane, with the partitions on each one nested beneath each entry.

To reformat your USB disk, click on its name in this pane, then switch to the Erase tab in the main interface (if it’s not already selected) and hit Erase to wipe the drive. How to format a USB drive: which format? If you follow the instructions above then Windows will, by default, format your disk using Microsoft’s NTFS filesystem, while a Mac might suggest the Mac OS Extended filesystem. These formats are sensible defaults because they support all the features of their respective operating systems, such as native compression and encryption. However, neither is suitable if you want to move files back and forth between Macs and PCs: OS X can read NTFS volumes, but it can’t write to them, while Windows in its default configuration can’t access HFS+ disks at all. There are free drivers available, but again these are limited to read-only access.

To use your USB disk on both Windows and OS X, therefore, you’ll need to use a different filesystem. You can choose this from the drop-down menu in Windows' Format. Dialogue, or in the Erase pane of Disk Utility. In most cases we recommend you select Microsoft’s exFAT format: this will give you full read and write access in both Windows (Vista or later) and OS X (Snow Leopard 10.6.5 or later).

If you need compatibility with systems that are older than this, you’ll need to fall back to the ancient FAT32 format. This is supported by all versions of Windows and OS X (as well as Linux), but it has the drawback of not supporting individual files larger than 4GB – which can be a pain if you work with large video files or databases. On a Mac, you can format any disk as FAT32 by simply choosing “MS-DOS (FAT)” from the dropdown menu in Disk Utility before you click Erase. For historical reasons, Windows won’t offer FAT32 as an option if your disk is larger than 32GB, but you can format a disk of any size by opening a Command Prompt and typing format h: /fs:fat32 /q, where h: is the letter of your removable drive and the /q parameter specifies a quick format – assuming you don’t want to wait around for Windows to check each sector of the drive for errors. How to format a USB drive: allocation unit size. As well as choosing a disk format, Windows also invites you to specify an “Allocation unit size”. Simply put, this determines the size of the chunks in which storage is allocated for your files: if you choose 4096 bytes (the NTFS default), every file that’s saved to that disk will be allocated space in multiples of 4KB.