- #Seagate external hard drive for both mac and pc how to#
- #Seagate external hard drive for both mac and pc for mac#
- #Seagate external hard drive for both mac and pc mac os x#
#Seagate external hard drive for both mac and pc mac os x#
This would be a good volume to install Windows onto, but beware that Mac OS X only has read-only support for NTFS built-in.
#Seagate external hard drive for both mac and pc how to#
The FAT volume format is showing its age, but a huge variety of OSes know how to work with it. This is a good place to put files that you want both Mac and Windows to have read/write access to.
#Seagate external hard drive for both mac and pc for mac#
The best external hard drive for Mac in 2021 - PC. Avoid Master Boot Record, which Intel Macs can't boot from. The Best Mac External Hard Drive and SSD Deals This Week WD My Passport 5TB Portable External USB.
Your hard drive should work on either computer at that point, as well as others you may try to use it on. Under Volume Scheme, choose 1 Partition, then click Options.
You should choose the filesystem that you plan on using most frequently so that it is as fast as possible and then reformat the disk accordingly. On the Mac, this can be accomplished using add-ons related to the MacFuse project. Look at additional software which will allow for either NTFS or HFS+ to be read on OS X and Windows respectively. Some older drives are formatted specifically for PCs, some specifically for Macs, and some of them have special utilities allowing them to work between both without. This could be used to move data between the Mac and the Windows machine, but would suffer from all the same FAT32 issues mentioned above. Newer Seagate and LaCie branded external drives come preformatted with the exFAT file system, which allows it to be used on both Mac and Windows without reformatting the drive. In addition to limitation to file sizes < 4 GB, you also lose a lot of nice features on HFS+ such as permissions and journalling.Ĭreate a FAT32 partition on the disk along side the existing HFS+ partition. Reformat the disk to FAT32, which ( as suggested by Michael Sturm) is the lowest common denominator in file systems between OS X and Windows. This file system type is not natively supported by Windows, which is why the disk will not mount when you plug it into your laptop. If it is Mac OS Extended or a something similar then your disk is using the HFS+ file system, which is the default for OS X. the name you see in your file tree when the disk mounts under OS X) what do you see for the Format at the bottom of the window? If you open the Disk Utility application on your Mac with the disk connected, you should be able to see it in the list of disks on the left hand column of the Disk Utility window.