- Format Hard Drive For Mac Os X Install Disc
- Format Mac Drive In Windows
- New Hard Drive Os Install
- How To Wipe A Mac Hard Drive
- Macbook Pro Format Hard Drive
However, when we connect a NTFS formatted disk to Mac, Mac OS X doesn't allow us to write files to the drive neither edit files, though it can read a NTFS drive. Similarly, Windows OS will ask us to format the HFS+ formatted drive when we connecting such a disk, let along edit files saved on HFS+ formatted hard disks unless we resort to third. Here's how to format a drive using a Mac - including how to format a drive for Windows and Mac so the contents can be read on both platforms, and what format to use for Time Machine.
Oct 10,2020 • Filed to: Hard Drive Recovery • Proven solutions
Format Hard Drive For Mac Os X Install Disc
'My computer is in a boot loop and it doesn't even get to the Windows logo. I need a way to format hard drive from bios because I have no other way to format it. Am I able to do it? Thank you for any kind help!'
This is the desperate cry for help of someone who needs to fix their computer, and also a question frequently asked by those who, for one reason or another, have no other way of formatting their disk. But is it possible to format HDD from BIOS? If yes, how can you do it? Read on to find how to use your PC's BIOS to format your hard drive.
Part 1: Why Would I Format Hard Disk from BIOS Settings?
Formatting your hard drive from BIOS is not the most common path. However, there are moments when you simply have no other option.
For instance, your computer might be in a boot loop that prevents Windows from starting. If you have a similar problem, regardless of the version of Windows you run, perhaps you want to know how to format drive from BIOS.
Another situation when you might want to format a hard disk from BIOS is when you want to format the system partition. Indeed, because the operating system is installed on this partition, you won't be able to format it when booting from hard disk. Reinstalling the operating system also requires to format the system partition, and this is not possible when the computer is booted normally. As such, you'll have to boot from BIOS. But how? Read on to find it out.
Part 2: Can I Format Hard Disk from BIOS Settings?
In short, no. Not only you can't format hard drive from BIOS; you actually can't format any drive or partition directly from those settings. 3d objects for punch software.
That's because your computer's BIOS was not designed for this purpose. This firmware is used to perform hardware initialization during the booting process, not to format or reboot your system. It also provides runtimes for operating systems and programs by making data accessible to the microprocessor.
In other words, the BIOS determines if all the attachments are operational when booting up your computer, and it loads the operating system into the RAM as your computer is running. While the BIOS detects the hard drive and allows you to boot the operating system from it, it doesn't let you format the disk. In fact, it is the operating system itself that allows you to format the entire hard disk, except for the system partition.
Now, even if it is impossible to format hard drive from BIOS, you shouldn't despair. There are other ways you can use to achieve your purpose. The easiest way is to boot from a bootable drive such as a CD, DVD, or USB flash, by changing the BIOS settings to allow formatting.
Before you start, remember that the formatting process will delete all the data on your drive, including data on the system partition. If possible, you should back up your data before booting from a bootable drive to prevent any data loss. With this in mind, let's now see how to format a hard disk from BIOS.
Part 3: How to Format Hard Drive from BIOS
To format hard drive from BIOS, you have to change the settings to boot automatically from disk. In this way, when the disk is loaded upon restart, the PC will prompt a message asking you whether you want to reformat the drive.
If your computer runs Windows 7 or previous versions, you'll need a Windows disk to perform the format. Windows 10 users may be able to perform this operation without a disk, via the command prompt window.
1. Format Hard Drive on Windows 7 or Earlier Versions
Best mac antivirus and malware protection. Step 1 Restart your computer and press F8 or Del key to enter the BIOS settings. The system tells you what key to press during the restart, so pay attention to your screen and be quick at pressing the right key.
Step 2 Once you've entered the BIOS settings, use the arrow keys to select Advanced BIOS Features. Press enter to open the menu and set the first boot device as either CD, DVD, or USB.
Step 3 After you have changed the settings, insert the bootable drive into the CD unit or USB plug, and reboot your computer. The system will prompt you with the option to format the hard drive. Select the first option to format hard drive.
2. Format Hard Drive on Windows 10
If you have Windows 10, you can format hard drive from BIOS via the command prompt. Royal tsx 1 4 6. To do this, you have to create an installation media (either a bootable CD or USB flash drive) with the Windows 10 Media Creation Tool. Once you've done that, follow the steps below:
Step 1 Set the boot drive in BIOS as explained above, then reboot your computer from the installation media.
Step 2 When Windows setup loads, select your language, time and currency format, and keyboard or input method, then click next.
Step 3 The next screen prompts you to click on Install Now, but you have to choose the Repair your computer option at the bottom of the screen.
Step 4 Choose Troubleshoot on the next screen.
Step 5 In the Advanced options screen, click on Command Prompt.
Step 6 Find the system partition by typing the following commands and hitting the enter key each time:
In the commands above, F is the directory of the selected volume (which is typically F on Windows 10, not C as on older versions of the operating system). If you can't find Windows here, just repeat the commands and replace F with C or D until you find it. Windows is listed in the directory of the selected volume, so just check to see if it's there.
Step 7 Once you found Windows, supposing it's on partition F, enter the following command: format F: /fs:ntfs (replace F with the partition letter where Windows is installed on your computer).
The system will prompt you with a message informing you'll lose all data and ask if you want to proceed with the format. Type Y and press enter to start formatting.
Bonus Tips: Formatted Hard Drive Data Recovery
More often than not, you're wondering how to format hard drive from BIOS because the system is jammed, and you can't turn on your computer successfully anymore. Subsequently, you might lose important data during the rebooting and formatting.
Luckily, you can use the Recoverit Data Recovery for Windows to retrieve any lost data. This complete data recovery app can find your lost or inaccessible content, let you preview those files to make sure they are the right ones, and recover them to any location of your choice. A few things you should know about Recoverit:
Recoverit Data Recovery
A Life Saver to Solve Your Data Loss Problems!
- Supports over 1,000 different file formats for compressed files, documents, audio, photos, videos, and more.
- It scans and shows a preview of all hidden files not only from your PC's internal and external hard drive.
- Lets you preview the retrieved data, decide what to recover, and where to save your files.
- It can retrieve any types of files that were accidentally deleted, corrupt files, and other data from lost or formatted partitions.
- Supports the latest Windows version, including Windows 10/8.1/8/7/Vista/XP.
Here's how to use Recoverit Data Recovery to recover any lost files on Windows systems:
Step 1Download and install the software
Download the this best data recovery software after formatting hard disk from the website and install it on a separate partition from that where you deleted or lost data, then register with the key received via email upon purchase.
Step 2 Select the location and start
Select the formatted partition and click Start.
Step 3Wait for the software to scan the partition.
The software will prompt you with a preview of the retrieved data.
Step 4 Preview and save the recovered data
You can now preview the retrieved data and decide which files you want to recover. To do that, simply click on the Recover button and wait for the software to recover and launch your files. For higher chances of success, choose to save the files on another partition or hard drive.
Conclusion
Whether you want to format hard drive from BIOS due to an unexpected system failure or just because you want to reinstall your system, the steps above should help you do it like a pro. You now even know how to recover any lost data, in case you had important files saved on the same partition as your operating system.
Before you start, remember that formatting your hard drive is a permanent procedure that can't be reversed. So, make sure you have a bootable drive at hand to install Windows again; then, you can always use a trusted data recovery software to get back any data you might have lost.
Read More: How to Perform PS4 External Hard Drive Format?
Summary :
Want to format an external hard drive for Mac and Windows PC? Do you know how to do this work easily? This MiniTool article will show you specific methods to make external hard drive compatible with Mac and PC, which are easy and safe to complete.
Quick Navigation :
As we know, external hard drives are widely used to backup data or interchange files among different computers. Well, is there an external hard drive that could be shared between Mac and Windows PC? Of course, there is. Actually, most external hard disks could be compatible with Mac and PC as long as you format them correctly.
Why Need to Format External Hard Drive for Mac and PC
To put it simply, if you want to share external hard drive between Mac and PC, you need to format an external hard drive for Mac and PC.
Currently, hard drives for Windows PC are always formatted with NTFS, while hard disks for Mac are formatted with HFS+. However, when we connect a NTFS formatted disk to Mac, Mac OS X doesn't allow us to write files to the drive neither edit files, though it can read a NTFS drive. Similarly, Windows OS will ask us to format the HFS+ formatted drive when we connecting such a disk, let along edit files saved on HFS+ formatted hard disks unless we resort to third party programs.
But luckily, there are file systems well supported by both Mac and Windows PC, and they are FAT32 (it might be called MS-DOS on Mac) and exFAT. As long as we format the external hard drive to one of these 2 file systems, it can be shared between Mac and Windows.
Further Reading
Both FAT32 and exFAT have advantages and disadvantages.
FAT32: FAT32 works with all versions of Windows, Mac OS, Linux, game consoles, etc.
However, single files on a FAT32 drive can't be larger than 4GB. If your external drive saves files larger than 4GB or you plan to save larger files to this drive, converting to FAT32 is not recommended.
In addition, a FAT32 partition must be not more than 32GB if you create it in Windows Disk Management. Of course, there is free partition manager that can help create a FAT32 volume up to 2TB, which also functions correctly.
exFAT: exFAT has very large file size and partition size limits, which means it's a good idea to format your external hard drive to exFAT.
Nevertheless, a lot of users complained that exFAT is slow, and they highly suggest using FAT32 if you can avoid file size constraints.
Three Options for Accessing NTFS Drives on Mac
Paid Third-Party Drivers
Some paid third-party NTFS drivers for Mac can be used to access NTFS drives on Mac. They work well and they have better performance than the free solutions which will be mentioned in the following part. Paragon NTFS for Mac is such a driver.
Besides, you can also use the paid third-party file system converters to convert NTFS to FAT32 or exFAT which are compatible with both Mac and PC. MiniTool Partition Wizard is one representative.
Free Third-Party Drivers
FUSE for macOS is a free and open-source NTFS driver that can enable write support. But, this solution is slower relatively. And the automatically mounting NTFS partitions in read-write mode can be a security risk for your Mac computer.
Apple's Experimental NTFS-Write Support
The Mac OS has an experimental support for writing to NTFS drives. Usually, it is disabled by default and needs some messing around in the Mac terminal to enable it.
It doesn't work properly all the time and could lead to potential issues with your NTFS file system. For example, it had corrupted data before. Thus, we don't suggest using this tool and we believe it is disabled by this reason. https://coolaup155.weebly.com/secret-garden-game.html.
Here, we recommend using the paid third-party tools since they are easy-to-use and can do good work for you.
Then, we will introduce these three options for you in the following content.
The Best Paid Third-Party Driver: Paragon NTFS for Mac
Paragon NTFS for Mac can write, edit, delete, copy, or move files on NTFS volumes from your Mac computer. It offers a 10-day free trial. If you want to use it all the time, you need to pay for it.
With it, you don't have to fiddle with terminal commands to mount partitions manually. Additionally, it can mount partitions automatically and safely. More importantly, it can code with the potential corruption. If you purchase a Seagate drive, you can even get a free download of Paragon NTFS for Mac.
All in all, it does its works well and gives you good user's experience.
The Best Free Third-Party Drivers: FUSE for macOS
FUSE for macOS is a free solution to access NTFS on Mac. But it is less secure.
If you want to make automatically mount NTFS partitions in read-write mode on Mac, you need to temporarily disable the System Integrity Protection and replace one of Apple's built-in tools with a binary that is more vulnerable to attack. Thus, your Mac is in danger when using this driver.
However, you can use it to manually mount NTFS partitions in read-write mode if you never mind using the Terminal. This will be safer, but you need to do more work. You can go to google the steps and see how complex they are.
Apple's Experimental NTFS-Writing Support: Don't Do This, Seriously
Although we mentioned this method in our article, we still don't recommend it because it is the least tested. It is just for educational purposes, and it is available on Mac OS 10.12 Sierra. Perhaps, it will be unstable forever.
How to Quickly Format External Hard Drive for Mac and PC without Losing Data
Another way to access NTFS drive on Mac is to convert the NTFS/HFS+ to FAT/exFAT. Then, the drive can be used on both Mac and PC.
There should be some important data on the drive. To keep it safe, you can choose this best NTFS/HFS+ to FAT/exFAT converter: MiniTool Partition Wizard.
How to Convert NTFS to FAT32 or exFAT Without Data Loss
To format hard drive for Mac and Windows without data loss, we suggest using MiniTool Partition Wizard and its 'Convert NTFS to FATS32' function. If you are a personal user, you can try its Professional Edition.
Step 1: Run MiniTool Partition Wizard
Download this software to your computer. Then, you can open the software and input the license key to the pop-out window to get its Professional Edition. Cost of microsoft office for mac.
Step 2: Convert NTFS to FAT32 with This Software
After running the program successfully, we can see its main interface as follows:
Here, please select the NTFS partition of external hard drive and choose 'Convert NTFS to FAT' feature from the left action pane. If there is more than one NTFS partition, convert all of them one by one.
At last, click 'Apply' button to make the change executed.
When MiniTool Partition Wizard shows it applies the change successfully, the original NTFS will finally become a FAT32 partition.
By this way, you can easily format an external hard drive for Mac and PC without losing any data. Then, you can share external hard drive between Mac and PC
You Can Convert NTFS to exFAT in 3 Steps
However, if you want to convert NTFS to exFAT to make external hard drive compatible with Mac and PC, 3 steps are required.
Step 1: Transfer Data out from External Hard Drive
You can choose to copy and paste those files to other external devices or internal hard disk of Windows, but it will cost much time. Instead, you can use MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition to create a copy for your external drive, which is faster.
If there is only one NTFS partition on external hard drive, refer to the tutorial Copy Partition to get instructions. However, if there is more than one NTFS partition, view Copy Disk to get specific operations.
Step 2: Create exFAT Partition with MiniTool Partition Wizard
The Free Edition of this software also enables you to do this job.
Firstly, you need to delete the partition by using this software. Just open the software to enter its main interface. Then, choose the target partition and click 'Delete Partition' from the left action pane. After that, you should click 'Apply' to keep this change.
Secondly, the target partition will become unallocated. Here, you need to choose that partition and click on 'Create Partition' from the left action pane.
Thirdly, you will see a pop-out window. Here, you can choose 'exFAT' from the 'File System' setting option. At the same time, you can also set some other parameters for this partition, including 'Partition Label', 'Drive Letter', 'Size And Location'. After that, please click on 'OK'.
Fourthly, you will go back to the main interface. Then, please click on 'Apply' to save these changes.
Finally, an exFAT partition will be created on your external hard disk so that it could be shared between Mac and Windows PC
Step 3: Transfer Data back to External Drive Drum programming software mac.
If you want to share files that you have backed up between Mac and PC, now please transfer these files back to external hard drive.
How to Convert HFS+ to FAT32 or exFAT without Losing Data
Besides, you can format an external hard drive for Mac and Windows by converting HFS+ to FAT32 or exFAT without losing any data.
Step 1: Backup Data in HFS+ Partition on Mac
Just transfer all useful files out from the external hard drive to other devices on Mac. Of course, if you have a backup already, ignore this step.
Step 2: Create a FAT32 or exFAT Partition on Windows PC
Some people may ask why create such partitions on Windows rather than Mac. That is because there are cases reporting FAT32 (MS-DOS) or exFAT partitions created on Mac did not work well on Windows.
Please skip to Solution 1: Format External Hard Drive to FAT32 to get steps to create a FAT32 partitions or go back to Step 2: Create exFAT Partition with MiniTool Partition Wizard to get operations to create an exFAT partition.
How to Make an Empty External Drive Compatible with Mac and PC
If there is no file saved on your external hard drive, how to make external hard drive compatible with Mac and PC?
It's very easy to share it between Mac and PC and you also need a Windows computer, a Mac machine, and the free partition manager MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition.
There are 3 solutions for this case, so please choose the one you like most to format external hard drive Windows 10/8/7.
Solution 1: Format External Hard Drive Windows 10/8/7 to FAT32
Since users are unable to create a FAT32 partition larger than 32GB in Windows Disk Management, they need to use MiniTool Partition Wizard Free.
Please download and install this program on your Windows computer to format an external hard drive for Mac and PC.
Firstly, open the software to enter its main interface as follows. Here, please select the NTFS partition or HFS+ partition of external hard drive, and click 'Delete Partition' feature from the left action pane. If there are multiple partitions on the external disk, please select the disk and click 'Delete All Partitions' feature instead. After that, an unallocated space will be released.
Secondly, you can create one or more FAT32 partitions in unallocated space. Select the unallocated space and choose 'Create Partition' feature from the left side.
Then, you should choose 'FAT32' from the 'File System' option in the pop-out window. Meanwhile, you can set properties for this new partition and click 'OK' to go back to the main window of Partition Wizard.
At last, click 'Apply' button to make all changes performed.
Solution 2: Format External Hard Drive Windows 7/8/10 to exFAT
Firstly, please delete the NTFS or HFS+ partition in either MiniTool Partition Wizard or Windows Disk Management to release unallocated space. Then, you can create an exFAT partition with MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition by following steps introduced in the section Step 2: Create exFAT Partition with MiniTool Partition Wizard.
Once a FAT32 or exFAT partition is created on your external hard drive, you can share it on both Mac and Windows PC.
Solution 3: Create One HFS+ Partition for Mac and One NTFS Partition for Windows
Alternatively, you can create 2 partitions on the external hard drive: one is for Mac, and the other is for Windows. As to size for each partition, it depends on your own demands. By this way, you can easily format an external hard drive for Mac and Windows.
Step 1: Create a NTFS Partition and a FAT32 Partition
Please run MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition, then delete all the original NTFS or HFS+ partition(s), and create a new NTFS partition as well as a FAT32 partition, and the latter will be formatted to HFS+ in Mac machine.
Then, select the external hard drive and choose 'Delete All Partitions' to create an unallocated space.
Here, select the unallocated space and choose 'Create Partition' feature from the left action pane.
Now, please specify partition label (Windows is recommended), partition type (primary or logical), drive letter, file system (NTFS), cluster size, and partition size (you can change the length of the handle to adjust partition size). Then, click 'OK' to continue.
Now, you can see a NTFS partition is created. Please use the same way to create a FAT32 partition labeled with Mac. At last, click 'Apply' button to make all changes performed.
Step 2: Format the FAT32 Partition to HFS+ Partition on Mac
Please go to Utilities → Disk Utility to get the window below:
Then, select the external hard drive and click 'Partition' tab on the top.
Now, find the FAT32 partition and format it to OS X Extended (Journaled), which is the desired HFS+. Finally, click 'Apply' button to make all changes performed.
After NTFS partition and HFS+ partition are created on your external hard drive, it can be shared between Mac and Windows PC.
Bottom Line
Are you planning to format an external hard drive for Mac and PC? If yes, now try one of our methods to make external hard drive compatible with Mac and PC.
Should you have any problem, just feel free to leave us a message in comment part below or send an email to [email protected].
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