Fomat For Both Windows And Mac
May 08, 2017 In this situation, the best way to ensure that both a Mac and a Windows PC can access the videos from the same external device is to make sure the device is in the correct disk format. This article explains how to format a device or disk (e.g. USB flash drive, external hard drive) into the proper format that is accessible by both Mac.
If you open the Disk Utility application on your Mac with the disk connected, you should be able to see it in the list of disks on the left hand column of the Disk Utility window. If you click on the the partition (i.e. The name you see in your file tree when the disk mounts under OS X) what do you see for the Format at the bottom of the window?
If it is Mac OS Extended or a something similar then your disk is using the HFS+ file system, which is the default for OS X. This file system type is not natively supported by Windows, which is why the disk will not mount when you plug it into your laptop. You have a couple of options: • Reformat the disk to FAT32, which () is the lowest common denominator in file systems between OS X and Windows. In addition to limitation to file sizes. Depends on the filesystem type and partitioning scheme whether it'll work on both. If the hard drive were formatted for HFS it would not show up on the Windows Computer.
If the Partition Scheme were Apple Partition Map, it would also not show up. For maximum compatibility, back up everything from the external hard drive onto your Mac. Open Disk Utility, select the external hard drive and go to Partition.
Under Volume Scheme, choose 1 Partition, then click Options. Choose Master Boot Record. Then choose MSDOS under the Format menu. Then click Apply. Your hard drive should work on either computer at that point, as well as others you may try to use it on. If you want something that both machines / OSes can read a write, and that can act as an emergency boot drive for either machine, do this: • Reformat the drive, using the GUID Partition Table (GPT) as the low-level partition table format. Avoid Master Boot Record, which Intel Macs can't boot from.
Also avoid Apple Partition Map, which Windows machines would have no clue about. • Give the drive one HFS+J (Mac OS Extended, Journaled) partition large enough to install Mac OS X onto (10GB+). This volume format accommodates Mac OS X and Mac files the best. 
• Give the drive one FAT32 (MS-DOS) partition, which both Mac OS X and Windows can read and write. This is a good place to put files that you want both Mac and Windows to have read/write access to. The FAT volume format is showing its age, but a huge variety of OSes know how to work with it. • If you want the drive to have a volume that's more optimal for Windows than FAT, give it an NTFS partition as well. This would be a good volume to install Windows onto, but beware that Mac OS X only has read-only support for NTFS built-in. If you want your Mac to be able to write to this partition, you'll need third-party software to enable this on Mac OS X.
FAT32 (called MS-DOS (FAT) by Disk Utility; a filesystem originally released in 1977 and updated a few times since, lastly in 1996) really is the only cross platform filesystem that is going to work fully out of the box with Windows and Mac OS X. Be careful though, if you are using Disk Utility to format the drive, you should make sure to choose the Master Boot Record partitioning scheme (hit the 'Options.' Button below the 'Partition Layout' control on the Partition pane). Clean up tools for chrome on mac. The default GUID partitioning scheme won't be recognised by 32-bit Windows XP and earlier Windows operating systems and Mac OS X versions earlier than 10.4. Mac OS X has had support for reading NTFS formatted disk for a few versions, but still doesn't have write support. There are a few third-party products that allow Mac OS X to read NTFS formatted drives but as far as I'm aware the free ones aren't as well maintained as the commercial ones. I'd love for someone to tell me differently.