In the Disk Utility app on your Mac, choose View Show All Devices. In the sidebar, select the disk you want to format to use with Windows computers. Click the Erase button. Click the Scheme pop-up menu, then choose Master Boot Record. Click the Format pop-up menu, then choose one of the following. How to use Mac formatted external hard drive on Windows? I had information from a broken Mac backed up at Best Buy, but because my Mac broke, now I only have a Windows computer. It seems they formatted the drive to the Mac format, but I have no way to access the data, at least I think? Paragon HFS+ does cost $20, but it also offers a 10-day free trial. If you just need to recover files from a drive, 10 days is plenty of time to install this file system driver, copy your files over, and uninstall it. If you want to use Mac drives on Windows on an ongoing basis, paying $20 so you can use the drive properly is a pretty good deal. But you can open HFSExplorer, read a Mac-formatted drive, and copy the files to your Windows PC without paying a dime. It can also mount Mac.dmg disk images to get at the files inside them. This application's read-only nature isn't necessarily a bad thing.
The Hard Drives formatted for mac have an HFS+ file system. This file system is specifically for Mac systems and windows can't read this file system. You can have access to the HFS + file system hard drive on windows with the help of any third party software. There are a number of tools that can help you in this regard. But using a third party all the time for accessing a hard drive on windows is not good. A user has to know how to convert Mac formatted hard drive to Windows formatted.
The Windows system uses a hard drive with a different file system than the Mac systems. Windows-formatted hard drives have either NTFS file system of an FAT32 file system. Thus in order to make the hard drive Windows formatted, you have to convert the file system to NTFS or FAT32. In the further discussion, you will learn how to make a hard drive useful for Windows by changing the formatting of the drive.
Get a Backup
Before going ahead and formatting your hard drive for Windows, you should get a backup. Formatting of any kind can leave the hard drive totally empty by erasing all your data. There are a number of instances when users lose their important data due to formatting. Lg phone to mac. It is very important to save the integrity of your data on the hard drive.
You can take help of any third party tool to make a backup of your hard drive. Or you may opt to make a normal backup in your external drive or another computer. Make sure you perform all the backup properly, an improper operation may leave the hard drive with error and hard drive may ask for formatting before use. However, data from formatted disk error in Windows can be recovered generally with any good tool.
Taking a proper backup is very important for your data before formatting your hard drive. Some of the most important things to take care of involve using a hard drive carefully during any kind of transfer, installation or formatting.
Delete the Mac Formatted Partition
The first step in this regard should be deleting the Mac partition with HFS + file system. In order to make it possible, you have to run the disk management tool. Here is how to do it:
Right-click on Windows icon, select Disk Management.
Select the Mac drive from the list of drives - Make sure this is the drive you want to work on, if you do it for the Windows formatted drive in the list, it may cost you a lot of important data.
Right Click on the partition and select Delete Volume – This will remove the partition.
Right click on the space and select New Simple Volume from the list.
Open Mac Formatted Drive On Windows 10
Set the file system as NTFS or FAT 32 according to your need.
Delete EFI System Partition
Most of the times the mac drives are formatted with an EFI system partition. This is secure than the simple partition and you can't right click and format the drive. To format such a partition, you have to go through a complete wipe out of your hard drive. If your Mac drive has an EFI partition, follow the steps to format it:
Go to device management window – As explained in the above section.
Locate your drive partition which has Mac format file system.
Note the disk number from the window
To go to command prompt – Type Run in Search Box on Taskbar and press Enter > Type cmd and press Enter
OR
Go to Windows > Type cmd and press Enter
Type diskpart in the command prompt window and press Enter
Where are my word documents on mac. Type list disk in the diskpart window and press Enter
Find your disk with the disk number that you have seen initially
Type select disk and press Enter
Type Clean and press Enter
This will clean your hard drive all the data will wipe out. Now in order to use this on Windows, you have to designate a file system to the hard drive partitions.
Assign NTFS File System
Once you have wiped out the content of your disk along with file system that was stopping it from use by Windows. you can go ahead and give a file system to the partitions:
Go to disk management again
Select the Mac disk from the list of drives – It shows Not initialized message in the empty disk.
Right-click on the disk and select Initialize disk
Create a partition for your disk
Right click and select New Simple Volume
Set the file system as NTFS or FAT32 as per your requirement
The drive is now formatted and ready to use in Windows Operating System.
Microsoft 8 for mac. Usually Windows cannot read Mac formatted drive, but if you wish to use third party tools that can fill up the gap and provide access to Mac interface with Apple's HFS+ file system on windows.
One thing you should keep in mind while dealing with this kind of scenario is that when you connect your Mac formatted drive to Windows, you will be informed to erase it with notification 'you need to format the disk in drive X: before you can use it.' Just don't click 'Format' or else all the contents of the drive will be gone once and for all. Rather click 'Cancel' to avoid the situation. The message generally pops up because Windows does not understand or recognize the Apple's HFS+ file system. So don't format until you get the important files out of the drive. But if it does not contain any important files, then you can surely go ahead by clicking the 'Format' button.
Here in this article we would use certain third party tools to read the Mac formatted drive on Windows. Just carry on reading to learn the methods in real.
Dropshare 4 0 – secure file sharing tool. Method #1: Use HFSExplorer To Read Mac on Windows
It is freeware software available easily on the internet and can be used to read Mac files on Windows interface. Although HFSExplorer is not that fancy in appearance, but it does not install any driver that gets integrated with windows file explorer. So you can only open, read and copy the Mac OS files to Windows directory. In order to know its usage read carefully the steps mentioned below:
Step 1. Download HFSExplorer and install it accurately on your Windows PC.
Step 2. Connect your Mac formatted drive to your Windows PC and launch the HFSExplorer with admin privileges.
Step 3. Now go to 'File' menu and click on 'Load file system from device.'. It will trace your connected drive all of its own accord and you can easily load it.
Step 4. Tick tock: a tale for two 1 0 download free. Once the files system is loaded you can see the file contents of the Mac formatted drive on the Graphical window.
Step 5. Select your files, and click 'Extract' and choose a folder to save the extracted materials. They will straight away be copied to the location you have chosen on PC.
Also read: How to wipe a Mac clean before selling
Method #2:Open .Pages on Windows using iCloud
Opening a .page file format on Windows is not as simple as double-clicking the file and accessing it right away. But as long as you have the access to Apple ID, or any web browser like Chrome, Firefox, or Internet Explorer, you can definitely pull off the task. https://site-3689267-5751-8128.mystrikingly.com/blog/photoshop-software-for-mac. Just go through the method description given below to actuate the task:
Step 1. From your Windows PC, open any of your default browser and visit iCloud.com.
Step 2. Next you have to sign in with your Apple ID. If you don't have one, you can create one by the Sign-up option posted on the webpage. Now the surprising part is that signing up for an Apple ID immediately grants you 5 GB of free iCloud storage and this is what we are going to put to use in this tutorial.
Step 3. Once you are signed in to your Apple ID, click on the 'Pages' icon and new windows will pop up.
Step 4. Click on 'Settings' icon which is actually a 'gear' icon and click on 'Upload Document' option from the context menu. Again a new window will open up, and you have got to browse the pages that you wish to edit and upload it.
Step 5. Now to do the editing part, there are options available:
- Once the pages have been uploaded to iCloud, you can directly open and edit the documents utilizing web-friendly version of the Pages on the browser. It may not have all the tools you require as that of the Page app, yet it is commendable for quick changes.
- Secondly, you can click on 'Tools' icon and choose 'Download a Copy' option form the sub-menu and select 'word' to re-export the documents as Word-friendly files and open it using MS work in your Windows PC. The documents will be downloaded as .doc file and is made available for further download on your PC.
Step 6. Your file would now be downloaded with .doc extension which can be easily accessed with MS Word Processors.
Conclusion:
Mac External Hard Drive On Windows 10
Whether you use Mac or Windows OS, there shall obviously come a time when you will be bound to do use documents on both the systems, and you would definitely need a way out to open and modify documents between both the OS. Now running documents with .doc or .docx extension of windows is not that difficult to run on Mac, but if you decide to open .page file on Windows, follow the guidelines elaborated above.
