To be sure you’ve set the top level, click the right-pointing arrow on the left of the drive icon. Be sure not to select your external drive’s lower level, as this will cause formatting problems. Click on the first level of your external drive.In the pop-up on the left, your external hard drive should appear in the list under your Mac’s internal drive, under the “External” heading.Choose “Utilities” then “Disk Utility.”.From the “Finder” window, select the “Applications” folder from the left pane.

Select the “General” tab, then check that the “External Drive” checkbox is checked.If it doesn’t, try opening “Finder.” Then choose “Preferences.” Once connected, a drive icon should appear on your desktop.Plug your external hard drive into your Mac. If you’re using a MacBook to format the drive, ensure it’s either fully charged or connected to a power supply to ensure it doesn’t turn off in the middle of the process.Be sure to save the files you want to keep elsewhere before starting. We have a guide for backing up a Mac, as well as backing up a PC.Note: This process will remove any files you currently have on the drive. Now that you have your drive formatted based on how you plan to use it, take a few minutes and make sure you're backing up your computer. Going forward, you should be able to use the drive and its dual partitions on their respective operating systems. Give your settings a final lookover and click Apply. Then click the second partition, name it Mac and change its format to APFS. Name one partition Windows and change its format to exFAT. For example, you might want more storage for your Mac than you do for your PC. Click the + sign to add a second partition, then drag the lines to adjust the size of each partition. Select the drive from the left sidebar, then click the Partition tab. To do that, connect the empty external HD to your Mac and launch Disk Utility. You won't be able to write to the Mac side from your Windows computer, and vice versa, but it's a good solution for people who want all the advantages each format has to offer for its respective system. For example, if you have a 1TB hard drive, 500GB of storage can be used with your Windows computer, and 500 will be dedicated to your Mac computer. This solution is a little different than the previous two because instead of having one hard drive that works with both machines, you're splitting your HD into two sections, each dedicated to a different OS. Option 3: Create two partitions on your hard drive to use with each OS, separately. You aren't stuck with your drive formatted for one platform forever.

Hard disk format for mac and windows