partition external hard drive for mac and windows

In the sidebar to the left, select the LaCie Rugged SECURE drive that shows the. Be sure you’ve identified the Mac drive - if you accidentally delete partitions from another drive, you could damage your Windows installation or lose your files. Mac Open the Finder and go to Applications Utilities Disk Utility. Locate the Mac drive in the list of disks. This tool allows you to manage the partitions on drives connected to your computer - internal ones or external ones connected via USB. Click on This PC in the sidebar and look at your C: driveif it's almost. Press Windows Key + R to open the Run dialog, type diskmgmt.msc into the box, and press Enter to open it. First, open Windows' File Explorer and make sure you have enough free space for the partition you want to create. RELATED: Understanding Hard Drive Partitioning with Disk Managementįirst, open the Windows Disk Management tool. You’ll probably want to uninstall Java when you’re done.Įrase the Mac Partitions, Including the EFI System Partition Here is how to format your external hard drive for Mac and PC with this formatting software: Step 1. OS X and Windows include native support for FAT32 file systems, so if youre sharing an external hard drive between a Mac and PC, format it with FAT32. HFSExplorer unfortunately requires you install Java to use it, but it’s the only free option here. If you only have Windows systems available, you can use HFSExplorer to copy files from the drive onto your Windows system drive or another drive. If you have a Mac lying around, you can plug the drive into a Mac and back up the files. Instead, we’ll just be wiping the drive and starting over from scratch. This process won’t actually convert the file system. First, back up the data on the Mac-formatted drive if you have anything important on it.

Partition external hard drive for mac and windows