Mac OS X won’t let you create a FAT32 partition larger than 2TB so if your drive is larger than that, you’ll need to divide the available drive capacity into multiple partitions.

We’re going to do this anyway, so open Disk Utility from the prompt or by navigating to /Applications/Utilities.Ģ. If the drive is not formatted, you may get a message saying that the drive is unreadable by Mac OS X and asking you whether you want to format it via Disk Utility. The drive should automatically mount on your Mac’s desktop (if the finder preferences are set to show external drives). Connect the power supply (if necessary), connect to the Mac via USB or FireWire, and turn on the drive. Set up your drive following the manufacturer’s instructions. To format a drive as FAT32 from a Mac, follow these simple steps.ġ. Conversely, Windows 7 can’t read and write to drives formatted as HFS+–also known as Mac OS Extended (journaled)–unless you install third-party software such as Paragon’s. Macs running Snow Leopard or Lion can read from drives formatted as NTFS, but they can’t write to such drives unless you install a third-party driver or muck about in the Terminal. Windows prefers to use NTFS (which stands for New Technology File System, though it has been around for nearly 20 years now). Finally, Mac OS X’s Time Machine backup utility won’t work with FAT32. When formatting partitions, Windows 7’s Disk Management utility won’t let you create one that’s larger than 32GB, whereas Mac OS X Lion can create partitions as large as 2TB using its Disk Utility application. So if you work with bulky video clips, for example, adopting FAT32 may not be a good idea. FAT32 imposes a size limit of 4GB on single files. The chief drawbacks of FAT32 involve file and partition size limitations. Though this format has some limitations, it enjoys nearly universal support from active platforms, including Mac and Windows operating systems, and many gaming and Linux OSs. Looking to share an external hard drive between a Mac and PC? The best way to do it is with a drive formatted as FAT32.

How to format a mac computer