Newer Macs don’t have USB type-A ports and if your external hard drive’s cable is USB type A, then you will need an adaptor cable to connect it to your Mac. Depending on the model of the Mac and the drive, you may need to buy an adaptor.

The first thing you have to do is to obviously start your Mac and plug in the external hard drive. If you would prefer to read a more detailed and in-depth explanation of how to perform the external hard drive reformatting, please, read on. Next, select either the APFS (Apple File System) format or the Mac OS Extended File System format, set the partition scheme to GUID, and click Erase to format the external drive on your Mac.Select Erase and then type in a name for the external hard drive.Click on the name of the external drive in the left panel of the Disk Utility.

Open the Disk Utility tool on your Mac.Start the computer and plug in the external HDD.To format an external hard drive on your Mac, you need to complete the following steps: How to format external hard drive for Mac Follow the instructions bellow to format your external hard drive to exFAT. Your mac should then be able to read the hard drive even if you can’t upload or edit files. To get around this problem you will need to revert to NTFS formatting using your windows PC. This can happen if the external hard drive was formatted with a windows computer. You may encounter that your Mac with M1 chip cannot mount the external hard drive event when using exFAT formatting. Mac cannot mount external drive even with exFAT formatting. How to format external hard drive for Mac.Mac cannot mount external drive even with exFAT formatting.Select it, and the disk details should pop up. You should see your external disk in the left column.Connect your external drive to your Mac and open Disk Utility by going to Applications > Utilities in Finder.You can use it to format your external drive easily. Formatting an External Drive Using Disk Utilityĭisk Utility, if you didn't know, is the disk management center in macOS. Using either of these methods will permanently delete all data on your external disk, which is why it's vital you back up any data you would like to keep. There are two primary ways to format an external drive in macOS: Disk Utility or Terminal. The most direct solution is usually to format the drive and change it to a format that suits you. Similarly, in some cases, the external disk may be locked in a read-only format, which means you may be unable to write files to it. When you get a new external drive, it may already be formatted specifically for Windows or Mac, meaning it may not work on the other platform.

Best format for external hard drive mac