How do I reformat my external hard drive to work with my PC?

Question

I had my external hard drive reformatted to work with the MAC computers at my college for the semester to carry video files. Now I'm finished with the semester and I need it back to work with my home computers, a PC that runs on Windows. But when I plug it into my home computer it doesn't recognize the drive so I have no option to reformat it again. How do I switch it back? Do I have to wait until school starts up again and change it with a MAC?

Answer 1

since it was a mac drive you will need do a low level format and there are a few programs on the internet for free if they are very large drives it could take a long time. then once this process is done you can dot he high level format as a windows drive. like ntfs.

Answer 2

Wouldn't you like to use the drive with BOTH computers and avoid all these formatting activities?

Buy Paragon HFS+ For Mac, link below. If the drive is formatted NTFS, you can enable OS X to use it fully (read & write files) for free. (See the last paragraph below.)



To format in Windows....

Right-click the Start menu and choose "Properties". Click the "Customize" button, and put a check for "Display Administrative Tools".



Next, Start > Programs > Administrative Tools > Computer Management



-- On the left, under "Storage", select "Disk Management".

-- Click on the drive to select it.

-- Remove the partition, link below explains how.

-- Add a new partition, link below explains how.

-- Under the "Action" menu, select "All tasks" > Format. Choose NTFS.



To use NTFS drive volumes as read-write in OS 10.7 or later...

-- Download and install OSXFuse, link below. You must install this first.

-- Download NTFS-3G, link below.

-- Mount the NTFS-3G image, but do not install--It has two packages inside, and will try to install the defunct MacFuse first, which would fail. Instead....

-- Right-click the "Install NTFS-3G.mpkg" file, and choose "Show Package Contents".

-- A new Finder window will open. Change the view option to list or columns.

-- Navigate to Contents > Packages.

-- Open "NTFS-3G.pkg" and install.



EDIT:

In response to that "Format FAT-32" answer, DO NOT EVER format any large drive volume FAT. As Microsoft clearly states, FAT file systems are for small drive volumes only. FAT has a small number of clusters per volume, so the cluster size grows to enormous size on large volumes, wrecking efficiency.

Answer 3

control panel

system & Security

administrative tools

computer management

disk management

right click on your drive, choose format



this will re-format the drive for use on windows....all data on the drive will be erased. if you have multiple paritions on the drive you will need to reformat them individually. If a gpt parition table was used you will need to create a new table before being able to re-format.

Answer 4

Go into Computer Management and delete the partition. Then create a new partition and format it in NTFS.

Answer 5

Hi,



I would like to suggest you to format it in FAT32, it will be recognised on both (Mac or windows).

Answer 6

administration panel administrative equipment take care of computer pick disk administration the rigidity could be there and additionally you basically top click and choose format If it is not any longer there, then there's a topic and the computer can no longer see the rigidity

Answer 7

Format as FAT32, both can then read it.