Connect your external hard drive to your Windows 10 PC.

Format external hard drive with Windows built-in tool Well then, how to format an external hard drive to exFAT with Windows PC? Here we take an example of formatting external hard drive to exFAT in a Windows 10 PC. Thus, you’d better use the Windows machine to format your external hard drive. However, if you want to use the Mac to format your external hard drive to exFAT, you’ll face the problem that the external hard drive may not be compatible with the Windows PC. You can format the drive from either the Mac or the Windows machine. How to make external hard drive compatible with Mac and PC? Thus, many users would like to use exFAT instead of FAT32 to make an external hard drive for mac and windows interchangeable. However, FAT32 has a maximum 4GB file size limit whereas exFAT can work with files as large as 16EB. So, if you want to use an external hard drive on both Windows and Mac, you need to format it to a filesystem that is compatible with Windows PC and Mac.īoth FAT32 and exFAT can be used on Windows PC and Mac. Windows PC and Mac use different filesystems. The device that is now gone from the list is your USB device.Need to format an external hard drive for Mac and Windows Note: If you are unsure of the drive designation, unplug the USB drive temporarily before running the df command again.

In this example, the USB drive is /dev/sdb1. Locate the USB in the list and find the corresponding device. The terminal prints out a list of all mounted partitions and relevant information: used space, available space, used space percentage, and the path. Open the terminal and run the following command: df

Unmounting and formatting the USB drive.įollow the instructions below to format a USB drive using the terminal.

The easiest and fastest way to format a USB drive in Linux is through the terminal. Windows, Mac, Linux (requires extra drivers to access)

Windows, Mac (read-only), most Linux distributionsįor internal drives and Windows system files Their main features and differences are: File System The most commonly used file systems when formatting a USB drive are: There are many file systems in use, differing by maximum file size and operating system compatibility. Which File System to Use for USB Formatting? A user account with sudo/root privileges.

Format jump drive for mac and pc