Is this a joke? All you have to do is to connect the USB cable to your Mac and that’s it…right?
Well, not quite unless your external hard drive is pre-formatted as Mac OS Extended / FAT32. Since most external hard drives are pre-formatted as NTFS; Mac OS X can only read data from the hard drive; but it can’t write anything to it (unless you install other 3rd party software. I didn’t know this until I got an external hard drive a few months ago, and my friends have been asking me the same questions lately, so I thought it might be a good idea to put it on my blog so that others who got the same situation can solve the problem without calling their friends / technicians 
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Here is how to format your new external hard drive so that you can use it on your Mac:
Step 0. Connect your external hard drive to your Mac.
Step 1. Click on Go -> Utilities; or press the Shift + Command + U shortcut key:
Step 2. Find Disk Utility and double click on it:
Step 3. Select your external hard drive on the left hand side of Disk Utility:
Step 4. Choose the Erase tab on the right hand side of the screen, then choose the Volume Format you want. If you are using Macs only, then choosing Mac OS Extended (Journaled) would be good. If you got PCs around or you want PCs to be able to connect to your external hard drive, then the MS-DOS(FAT) is the one you want. (it formats the hard drive to FAT32).
Step 5. Click on the Erase button to format the hard drive. After that, you should be able to connect your new external hard drive to your Mac and being able to read and write data to it
hmm…but Apple should make this discoverable. They cant deny the fact that 90% of the Desktop Computing Market is Windows PC Market! Even Linux can automount Windows Partitions as well external drives!
Thanks a lot. I just bought the external drive about 1 hour ago and now I am following your instruction to perform a format to FAT32 on my external device. Thank you so much.
Re Payne: thanks for your feedback, am glad this post helped you
Thank you!
I bought an ext HD today and as soon as I saw the format advice in the instructions my blood froze. Thanks to your clear instructions it’s up and running with my MAC in a matter of minutes.
Hi David,
You are such a lifesaver!!!!! I bought my LACIE external hard drive about 1.5 years ago and the damn thing has been sitting in a corner for all that time because no one could tell how to connect it properly. Thanks to your post, I managed to hook it up in 20 seconds flat!!
Gracias, merci, danke schon, dank u wel!!!!
Tania in Belgium
Thank you ! for your article
Hi I agree, your instructions seem clear. Thanks. However, I have bought a maxtor external drive so I can use it at home on my Mac and at school on my PC (I am a teacher) and so need to use it to work at home and transport to work. (no a USB key will not do as I want to put the past two years work on my HD and be able to access it at home and at school and there are over 10 GB of files.
Can you suggest any way I can format the drive with partitions. Mind I am not a super genius on these things but from my pc days I remember drives were often partitioned.
Thanks, Jenni
Re Jenni
Thanks for your comments
Just wondering can you please send me an email so I can give you the instructions? My email address can be found on the About Me page at the very top of my blog
Thanks.
thank you, havent tried it yet, but it looks like what im needing. hooray for clever people.
Thanks so much for the simple instructions…now if only Macs would automatically recognize that the drive needs to be formatted (the way windows does) instead of giving cryptic error messages when attempting to write to the drive (the way mac fans claim macs never do).
Since the mac didn’t tell me upon plugging it in to format the drive…and the formatting process is so complicated and hidden in a utility (rather than simple right-click hard drive, click format)….i thought i didn’t need to format it and was thoroughly confused.
In conclusion, thank you sooo much!
thanks, this helps out us newbies