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
Thanks very much! didn’t have a scooby doo about how to make my new HD work, so very much appreciate your clear instructions…works like a charm now and only took a minute… thanks again..
Hmm. I was taught years ago to go into Disk utilities but then to select partition. Your way does work fine. Have I been doing it wrong all the while, or is it essentially the same end result?
Hi Pete,
Thanks for your comments. Your way of doing things does work as well, and you have more options too! But if all you wanted to do is to erase your new hard drive and connect it to your Mac, I guess using the things in “Erase” might be just a little easier 😀
Cool. Thanks for your post.
Thanks got a maxtor drive and trying to back up all my stuff but couldnt write onto it…. and nobody in the philippines knows how to use a mac, thanks!!!!
hi there i want to format my new external drive, i want it to work on both windows and mac i went to disk utils, but i dont see an option saying MS DOS (FAT), however it does say MS DOS FILE SYSTEM is that the same?
Hello! 😀
Mine doesn’t seem to have an MS DOS Format in the erase menu as well. Help? 😀
Worked perfect, thanks
Brilliant thanks i was so worried i was going to have to take it back because i couldn’t get it to work!
Hello,
This question might sound dumb but Im new to how External Hard drives work. So hopefully someone can ansewer a question for me:
If I set up an external hard drive for my mac, Can I put and run software on it?
The reason Im asking is because I would like to partition my mac with osx 10.4 and osx 10.5 and to do this I would have to reformat (erase to factory settings) my mac. If I do this I will lose all of my software.
So Im hoping if I use an external hard drive, I can copy all my software to it. Then partition my mac, and then send all my software back to my mac.
Does anyone know if something like this will work? or have any other suggestions?
I have a lot of third party software on my computer that I cant get again, they are all in my applications folder sooo I was hoping to copy the contents to the external HD then put it back.
Will the software still work?
Thank You,
Sincerely,
Michael
Thanks much.
I can’t even believe there aren’t more people like you explaining this stuff! If only I came across this earlier this week. It would have simplified my life! Now I know I have a hard drive that isn’t working, but now that I know what to do, I realize that I need a different one. You are amazing! Keep posting these things that seem so simple to you because most likely they are 20x more difficult for some of us 😛
thanks! I had been contemplating switching to a MAC when my PC laptop was stolen. Fortunately, I had backed up all of my data on an external hard drive. I would never have found out how to get everything working properly on my new MAC without this advice!
to anyone looking to get their data from a PC onto a MAC: copy your read-only files into your documents folder (or wherever you choose) then follow the steps outlined above. Once the hard drive is formatted, simply copy the files back onto the hard drive.
Additional bonus… Apple immediately asked if I wanted to use my external HD for the time-machine function. Awesome!
Thank you very much for this post, it was really really helpful and saved us from throwing the hard drive across the room in a fit of rage!
One of the best things about using macs is the support you can find on the internet which is absolutely invaluable
Thanks again
thank you thank you ….. thank you!! i have been going crazy trying to figure this out. now thanks to you my sanity is restored!! x
This is exactly what most of us need, someone to explain things in noddy language. You’ve just saved me a load of hassle. Thanks mate!
Hello David,
First of all congratulations on a first class site that explains and guides in a so simple way, I for one am very grateful.
A couple of nights ago we had a sudden power failure and since then our Western Digital 350 GB Ex/HD has not worked so I assume I`m in the market for another drive but before buying I would like to know if the Drive I have can be repaired, and is it possible to retrieve the material on that drive? I look forward to hearing from you when convenient,
John McCarthy in Australia
hi..
i have this usb to ide/sata converter, and when i connected it to a hard disk i removed from my old pc, it’s undetectable. it was formatted fat32. do i need a software for that? thx man..
I have a Seagate FreeAgent Go for Mac 500GB FW. It came already formatted as HFS+. The drive is recognized on my PowerBook, but when I try to drop something inside the drive, I get this: “The item cannot be copied because there is not enough free space.”. This is a brand new drive and nothing has been stored on it. I tried to reformat it to HFS+ and it continued to give me the same message. 😦 What should I do?
Dear David,
I bought a LaCie external drive and I am even not able to go further than this:
Step 2. Find Disk Utility and double click on it:
In the utilities there is no external drive visible, even though it is connected with USB and running. Could you help me on this ?
Thank you in advance
Kind regards
Manuel, Switzerland
PowerBook 5300ce so no USB ports
I want to transfer some of the data and files off the old PB hard drive to an iBook G4
Everyone I talk to gives me strange looks. Suggestions?
I have an external drive by the way but it is PC formatted
Your oh-so-clear instructions saved me from a total spazz out! I was able to get my HD up and running on my MAC in a matter of minutes. So rad! THANKS!
Brilliant !!!
I tried to do this as instructed, but got an error msg:
Volume Erase failed with the error:
Could not unmount disk
Can anyone help?
My problem is how to connect when there are no usb ports
Just wanted to add to the comments above, THANK YOU!! I am new to using a mac and my IT guy gave me an external hard drive and your instructions were so easy to follow that I was able to format the hard drive so now it works.
Hi David,
I’m just wondering if you know the Mac formatted external hard drive can be used for Windows as well? After I formatted my hard disk to Mac, my external hard drive cannot be open or even discoverable for Windows. So is there a way to solve this problem?