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In Disk Management, you’ll see your external hard drive as partition or unallocated space. Open the Disk Management tool by right-clicking This PC -> Manage -> Disk Management. Connect your external hard drive to your Windows 10 PC. Format external hard drive with Windows built-in tool Well then, how to format an external hard drive to exFAT with Windows PC? Here we take an example of formatting external hard drive to exFAT in a Windows 10 PC. Thus, you’d better use the Windows machine to format your external hard drive.
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However, if you want to use the Mac to format your external hard drive to exFAT, you’ll face the problem that the external hard drive may not be compatible with the Windows PC. You can format the drive from either the Mac or the Windows machine.
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How to make external hard drive compatible with Mac and PC?
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Thus, many users would like to use exFAT instead of FAT32 to make an external hard drive for mac and windows interchangeable. However, FAT32 has a maximum 4GB file size limit whereas exFAT can work with files as large as 16EB. So, if you want to use an external hard drive on both Windows and Mac, you need to format it to a filesystem that is compatible with Windows PC and Mac.īoth FAT32 and exFAT can be used on Windows PC and Mac. Windows PC and Mac use different filesystems. We’ll be back with new Howto Guide soon.Need to format an external hard drive for Mac and Windows We would really appreciate if you share this article. Again, please subscribe us for more such How to guides, tech updates and much more or like us/follow us on Twitter, facebook or Google+. We hope you liked this Howto guide, please let’s us know if you know any other workaround. Watch this video to know how to format any Hard Disk drive for Mac, Windows or any other OS. We have also attached a video guide here. It has notable limitations, including difficulties with files of size larger than 4 GB. Mac OS X supports this format for both reading and writing, as does Windows. However, it is still widely used as almost all Flash-based drives use this format. FAT32 is a legacy file system in the Windows world. Now you can use your external hard disk only with Mac systems or Mac OS. But what if we want to use the same hard disk drive on Mac, Windows or any other OS? Well, there are few workarounds like formatting HDD to MS-DOS, FAT32 or NTFS-3G.
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