
- HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO REFORMAT A HARD DRIVE FOR MAC HOW TO
- HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO REFORMAT A HARD DRIVE FOR MAC PORTABLE
- HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO REFORMAT A HARD DRIVE FOR MAC PC
- HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO REFORMAT A HARD DRIVE FOR MAC MAC
- HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO REFORMAT A HARD DRIVE FOR MAC WINDOWS
Select "Disk Utility" and click "Continue. After a few moments, the macOS Utilities window should appear - this is known as Recovery Mode.Ĥ. Keep holding it until you see either the Apple logo, or an animation of a spinning globe.ģ. Press the power button to turn it on, then immediately press and hold Command (⌘) + R. Once you're ready to wipe your Mac, do the following:Ģ. If you're giving your computer away, also make sure that you've signed out of iTunes, iCloud, and iMessage - there's a chance your Apple ID data will remain on the drive after you reset it, and you don't want anyone gaining access to your account. This can take fairly long, depending on the speed of your external drive.
HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO REFORMAT A HARD DRIVE FOR MAC MAC
You can also backup onto iCloud, or manually move the files you want to save onto an external drive. Whether you have a Mac or a PC, all hard drives can properly be set up to work. You can do this through Time Machine, Apple's official backup application, which will copy all your files onto an external drive.
HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO REFORMAT A HARD DRIVE FOR MAC HOW TO
If you already have data stored on the drive, back that data up elsewhere, reformat the drive, and then put your data back on the drive.Check out the products mentioned in this article: MacBook Pro (From $1,299.99 at Best Buy) How to wipe a Mac computer with a factory resetīefore anything, if you don't want to lose the files you have saved on your computer, you should back them up. Reformatting will delete all the data stored on the drive, so if you need to reformat, do so as soon as you buy the drive. Now that you’ve figured out those differences, it’s time to reformat your hard drive.
HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO REFORMAT A HARD DRIVE FOR MAC WINDOWS
It’s possible, but tricky, to change the size of a partition later on in Windows and macOS we recommend backing up the data on your drive before attempting the task, since it’s possible to wipe your drive doing this. Make sure to leave plenty of room for future backups on both partitions. Now your computer will see your single drive as multiple, smaller drives. First, partition the drive using Disk Utility with macOS, and (using our walkthrough below) format one part as HFS+ and the other as FAT32 then, plug the drive into Windows and reformat the FAT32 portion as NTFS. If you want to use a single external hard drive to back up both File History and Time Machine, you can partition it so that some of the drive is NTFS and some is HFS+.exFAT works on both macOS and Windows, and it doesn’t have the file size limit that FAT32 does, so you’ll be able to back up movies and other large files. If you need to transfer files larger than 4 GB between Mac and Windows computers, exFAT (extended File Allocation Table) is the best option, although it doesn’t work with File History or Time Machine.Unfortunately, it isn’t any good for storing movies and other large files: FAT32 has a size limit of 4 GB per file, so your files have to be small. FAT32 was introduced in Windows 95 in 1997, but it remains useful because nearly every system can use it. FAT32 (File Allocation Table 32) is an older file system that both Windows machines and Macs still support.Like NTFS, the HFS+ file system has file and partition size limits that are much bigger and more suitable for modern use than those of FAT32. A drive formatted this way will not mount on a Windows computer without additional software. If you plan to use your drive for Time Machine backups on a Mac, and you use only macOS, use HFS+ (Hierarchical File System Plus, or macOS Extended).

Many backup archives and video files are larger than 4 GB. NTFS has huge file and partition size limits that you won’t hit that makes it a better choice than FAT32, which has a 4 GB size limit per file. macOS and Linux, however, can only read files stored on such a drive they cannot write to an NTFS-formatted drive. However, NTFS is not fully compatible with Mac computers.
HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO REFORMAT A HARD DRIVE FOR MAC PC
NTFS is native to Windows, and most hard drives are preformatted for this file system. Therfore, you can connect Backup Plus Desktop to a Windows PC without formatting the hard drive.

HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO REFORMAT A HARD DRIVE FOR MAC PORTABLE
If you buy an external drive-such as one of our recommended desktop hard drives, portable hard drives, or USB 3.0 flash drives-you may need to reformat it to work with your operating system of choice, since different operating systems use different file systems to process data.Īlthough it’s true that any drive is compatible with both Windows and macOS, most drives come preformatted for Windows out of the box.
