Now let’s use the Disk Utility to format your external drive. You will see the Disk Utility there – open it.

To find it, go to Finder > Applications > Utilities. Now you have to go to the Disk Utility app – this is the tool we will be using for the formatting process. After that, you should see the drive’s icon on the Desktop. If it doesn’t, go to Finder > Preferences > General and check the External Hard Drives option shown there. Once the external drive is connected to your Mac, its icon should show up on the Desktop. Therefore, if you have any important files stored on the drive, either upload them to your Mac or to another computer so that they don’t get lost. Simply search for “USB type A to type C adaptors” in Google (or another search engine) and you should be able to quickly find what you need.Īlso, know that any data stored on the external hard drive will be deleted after you (re)format it. Newer Macs don’t have USB type-A ports and if your external hard drive’s cable is USB type A, then you will need an adaptor cable to connect it to your Mac. Depending on the model of the Mac and the drive, you may need to buy an adaptor. The first thing you have to do is to obviously start your Mac and plug in the external hard drive. If you would prefer to read a more detailed and in-depth explanation of how to perform the external hard drive reformatting, please, read on. Next, select either the APFS (Apple File System) format or the Mac OS Extended File System format, set the partition scheme to GUID, and click Erase to format the external drive on your Mac.Select Erase and then type in a name for the external hard drive.Click on the name of the external drive in the left panel of the Disk Utility.Open the Disk Utility tool on your Mac.Start the computer and plug in the external HDD.To format an external hard drive on your Mac, you need to complete the following steps: How to format external hard drive for Mac Follow the instructions bellow to format your external hard drive to exFAT. Your mac should then be able to read the hard drive even if you can’t upload or edit files. To get around this problem you will need to revert to NTFS formatting using your windows PC. This can happen if the external hard drive was formatted with a windows computer. You may encounter that your Mac with M1 chip cannot mount the external hard drive event when using exFAT formatting. Mac cannot mount external drive even with exFAT formatting. How to format external hard drive for Mac.Mac cannot mount external drive even with exFAT formatting.

Format an external drive for mac