How to format your hard drive Seagate branded external drives come preformatted, some for PCs, some for Macs, and some of them have special utilities allowing them to work between both without formatting. Seagate internal drives must be formatted before use. Drives that will be bootable are formatted during the process of installing the operating system (ie, Windows or MacOS). Drives that will be used for storage can be formatted according to the instructions below. Or, if you have a drive that is formatted for a different type of computer or a drive that is not preformatted, you will need to format the drive before you can use it. Formatting erases all data on the drive.

Give the drive one FAT32 (MS-DOS) partition, which both Mac OS X and Windows can read and write. This is a good place to put files that you want both Mac and Windows to have read/write access to. The FAT volume format is showing its age, but a huge variety of OSes know how to work with it. Windows uses NTFS and Mac OS uses HFS and they're incompatible with each other. However, you can format the drive to work with both Windows and Mac by using the exFAT filesystem.

So if you are formatting a drive that has already been used, be sure to copy any files you will ever want to see again onto a computer or backup drive. For instructions on how to format your hard drive on a Mac, please reference the following links: Formatting your drive in Windows • To open the Disk Management press and hold the Windows key ( ) + ( R ) • Type compmgmt.msc • If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation. • In the pane on the left, under Storage, click Disk Management.

• If the drive is secondary storage and hasn't been initialized previously you may be prompted to initialize the disk first. Note: MBR for drives under 2TB and GPT for drives over 2TB • The drive should say unallocated Note: If it does not you will need to right-click and delete the volume first. If the external hard drive is pre formatted for Mac, Disk Management will list 3 partitions and you will not be able to delete the 'Health (EFI System Partition)' because it's a protected partition. To delete this partition you have to use Microsoft Diskpart Erase utility. Please see the instructions. • Right-click and select new simple volume • Click next 3 times • Type the name of the drive in “Volume Label” • Make sure quick format is selected • Click next then finished See more information at the.