How to use a mac internal hard drive on pc how to#
Here’s how to partition a hard drive for use on Windows and Mac. You can check our Windows section for more information on this process. If you are concerned about the reliability factor of the exFAT file system, or the lack of it, there is a way to format the secondary Windows partition to NTFS, but it requires connecting the hard drive to a Windows computer. Note that you will see icons on the desktop for both units.
Click the Partition button in an additional pop-up window to complete the process. Enter a volume name, select the exFAT format, and click the Apply button. A second part appears, cutting the pie chart in half. On the next screen, click the little plus ( + ) button below the blue pie chart to add a second partition. Select the drive again in Disk Utility and click Partition. After completing this procedure, your disk should have only one partition. Click the Delete button to make these changes. In the next pop-up window, select a profile, in this case MacOS Extended (Journaled) for Format, and GUID Partition Map for Scheme or Partition Type. Click Delete, located on the top toolbar of the application. With Disk Utility open, in the Location option, your drive appears in External on the left. Double-click the Disk Utility icon in the next window. With Finder highlighted, click Go in the menu bar followed by Utilities in the drop-down menu. If the error does not appear, start with step 1. Like Windows 10, you may see an “initialization” error because the drive’s file system is not “readable.” Click the Initialize button in the small pop-up screen to create the first compatible partition, and then start at step 5. If you already have a Mac compatible partition, continue from step 5. Partitioning an external disk in MacOS is not that annoying, initially, we will assume that it does not have partitions, so we will need to create two.