How to format your hard drive Seagate branded external drives come preformatted, some for PCs, some for Macs, and some of them have special utilities allowing them to work between both without formatting. Seagate internal drives must be formatted before use. Activate office 2016 for mac. Drives that will be bootable are formatted during the process of installing the operating system (ie, Windows or MacOS).

I have a 320GB simple tech external hard drive that i used for my mac book pro. My mac book pro broke down completely so i bought an Asus laptop which runs Windows 7. To format the drive to work with both platforms you will need use a Windows computer to format the disk as exFAT. Update: At the time of the original posting in 2011, there were some problems getting a Mac formatted exFAT drive working with Windows, it had trouble recognizing those drives.

Drives that will be used for storage can be formatted according to the instructions below. Or, if you have a drive that is formatted for a different type of computer or a drive that is not preformatted, you will need to format the drive before you can use it. Formatting erases all data on the drive. So if you are formatting a drive that has already been used, be sure to copy any files you will ever want to see again onto a computer or backup drive. For instructions on how to format your hard drive on a Mac, please reference the following links: Formatting your drive in Windows • To open the Disk Management press and hold the Windows key ( ) + ( R ) • Type compmgmt.msc • If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation. • In the pane on the left, under Storage, click Disk Management.

• If the drive is secondary storage and hasn't been initialized previously you may be prompted to initialize the disk first. Text to screen for events. Note: MBR for drives under 2TB and GPT for drives over 2TB • The drive should say unallocated Note: If it does not you will need to right-click and delete the volume first. If the external hard drive is pre formatted for Mac, Disk Management will list 3 partitions and you will not be able to delete the 'Health (EFI System Partition)' because it's a protected partition.

To delete this partition you have to use Microsoft Diskpart Erase utility. Please see the instructions. • Right-click and select new simple volume • Click next 3 times • Type the name of the drive in “Volume Label” • Make sure quick format is selected • Click next then finished See more information at the.