How can the answer be improved? Once the drive is formatted it will be compatible to be read and written to on both a Mac and PC, and the resulting FAT file system is compatible with all versions of Mac OS X, Windows 95, 98, Windows XP, Vista, 7, Windows 8, even Windows 10, it’s one of the most widely recognized and usable file system formats.

Let’s see how to format USB drive for Mac and PC on Windows. AOMEI Partition Assistant and launch the software. In the main interface, locate the USB drive, right click it and choose Format Partition. Step 2. In the pop-up window, choose exFAT or FAT32 among the listed file systems. Then, click OK.

Another thought: Is there a small switch on the outside? Many pen drives has a small switch to enable write protection. I know mine did, and it near drove me insane to figure out why I couldn't write to my FAT16 formatted pen drive all of a sudden. Then I found the little switch, thought 'what have we got here?' And voila, it was suddenly read/write again.

Now, you can see a NTFS partition is created. Please use the same way to create a FAT32 partition labeled with Mac. At last, click ' Apply' button to make all changes performed. Step 2: Format the FAT32 Partition to HFS+ Partition on Mac Please go to Utilities → Disk Utility to get the window below: Then, select the external hard drive and click ' Partition' tab on the top. Now, find the FAT32 partition and format it to OS X Extended (Journaled), which is the desired HFS+. Finally, click ' Apply' button to make all changes performed.

Click on the Erase tab. Step 8: You will see Format: Select ExFAT. Plugins for adobe audition mac. Step 9: You will see Name: Input the name you would like to call it, for example your clients name or your business name.

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. Slicing up disk space in this way isn’t perfectly efficient. A file that’s only 1KB in size will still occupy 4KB of space, while a 5KB file will take up 8KB, and so on. In practice though, most of the files on your USB drive will probably be many megabytes in size, so the impact of wasting a few kilobytes here and there is negligible.

However, when we connect a NTFS formatted disk to Mac, Mac OS X doesn't allow us to write files to the drive neither edit files, though it can read a NTFS drive. Project management for mac review. Similarly, Windows OS will ask us to format the HFS+ formatted drive when we connecting such a disk, let along edit files saved on HFS+ formatted hard disks unless we resort to third party programs. But luckily, there are well supported by both Mac and Windows PC, and they are FAT32 (it might be called MS-DOS on Mac) and exFAT. As long as we format the external hard drive to one of these 2 file systems, it can be shared between Mac and Windows. Further Reading Both FAT32 and exFAT have advantages and disadvantages. FAT32: FAT32 works with all versions of Windows, Mac OS, Linux, game consoles, etc. However, single files on a FAT32 drive can't be larger than 4GB.

Finally, an exFAT partition will be created on your external hard disk so that it could be shared between Mac and Windows PC Step 3: Transfer Data back to External Drive If you want to share files that you have backed up between Mac and PC, now please transfer these files back to external hard drive. How to Convert HFS+ to FAT32 or exFAT without Losing Data Besides, you can format an external hard drive for Mac and Windows by converting HFS+ to FAT32 or exFAT without losing any data. Step 1: Backup Data in HFS+ Partition on Mac Just transfer all useful files out from the external hard drive to other devices on Mac.