



It showed this format: Format: Windows NT File System (NTFS) I then right-clicked the external drive icon on Mac desktop > Get Info. If I wanted to use it with Mac OS or Time Machine backup (which is my intent), I’ll need to format the drive for my Mac. It brought me to a webpage on Seagate’s site, where it clearly indicated the drive was initially set up to work with a Windows PC. Since I wanted to use it on Mac, I clicked the blue logo with the text “Start_Here-Mac”. When I opened it, the default content was all there. When I connected the Seagate to my Mac, the drive icon showed up like this. I bought a brand new 2TB Seagate Expansion to backup my MacBook Pro before I updated it to the latest macOS. Most External Hard Drives Are Initiated with NTFSĭuring the last several years, I’ve used a few external drives, including a 500GB WD My Passport, 32GB Lexar flash drive, and a few others. How to Partition an External Hard Drive on Mac.How to Format an External Drive for Mac.Most External Hard Drives Are Initiated with NTFS.We would really appreciate if you share this article. Again, please subscribe us for more such How to guides, tech updates and much more or like us/follow us on Twitter, facebook or Google+. We hope you liked this Howto guide, please let’s us know if you know any other workaround. Watch this video to know how to format any Hard Disk drive for Mac, Windows or any other OS. We have also attached a video guide here. It has notable limitations, including difficulties with files of size larger than 4 GB. Mac OS X supports this format for both reading and writing, as does Windows. However, it is still widely used as almost all Flash-based drives use this format. FAT32 is a legacy file system in the Windows world. Now you can use your external hard disk only with Mac systems or Mac OS. But what if we want to use the same hard disk drive on Mac, Windows or any other OS? Well, there are few workarounds like formatting HDD to MS-DOS, FAT32 or NTFS-3G.
