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#Format external drive for mac os x mac os x
#Format external drive for mac os x software

Choose the "Partition" tab that appears.

Select the drive device in the list of devices, which is the item above any storage volumes on the drive, and which may show the manufacturer name, media size, and so on.

To format the drive, attach it to your system and open Disk Utility, and then perform the following steps: In this case the options are grayed out because the boot drive cannot be repartitioned and formatted, but they should be available for external drives. When you select the drive device, the partition tab will appear.

#Format external drive for mac os x mac os x

If the drive is going to be used only with your Mac and with other Macs, then consider using Apple's Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) format, and only use FAT32 if you intend to use the drive with a Windows system.

#Format external drive for mac os x software

Additional tools from third-party manufacturers may lead to compatibility problems, as was recently seen when incompatible drive management software resulted in data loss for a number of people who had upgraded to OS X Mavericks.īecause of this, if the drive you have purchased is a special RAID array, then you may have to use the manufacturer's setup however, if it is a single-drive device, then before using it be sure to format it using Disk Utility in OS X. For one, unless the drive uses a special multidisk RAID setup, OS X already comes with all the necessary tools for managing the drive. While these may be convenient, they are not the most recommended approach to managing the drive. Sometimes drives will come with special drive management software on them that will give you options for partitioning the drive and backing up your files to it. In addition, FAT32 drives usually come with the Master Boot Record partition scheme, which does not work with Apple's CoreStorage routines, and therefore will not allow OS-supported encryption of the drive (among other customizations). Since FAT32 is readable and writable on both Windows and OS X systems, this is quickest way for a drive to work on each platform however, it does have some limitations, including the lack of journaling support that would help prevent data corruption, and lack of support for filesystem permissions. One of the first things to take into account is that the drive is likely preformatted to FAT32 instead of a more OS-specific format.

When you first attach a new external hard drive to your Mac, it should mount and be ready to use however, before relying on it, consider first taking a couple of precautionary steps to ensure that the drive continues to work as expected.