You'll see the selected hard drive's info displayed. Step 3: Select the external hard drive on the left-hand panel you want to format on Mac. You can add the Disk Utility to the Dock for quicker access. Step 2: Open Disk Utility by heading to Finder > Applications > Utilities and clicking on Disk Utility. If you are going to format extra internal drive on Mac, you have to partition hard drive on Mac. Step 1: If you want to format Mac external hard drive, connect the external hard drive you'd like to format to the computer. We emphasize once again before we get started that formatting hard drive for Mac and Windows PC will delete all these data on the drive. on MacBook Pro/Air, iMac using Disk Utility. If you've all set, follow steps below to format internal startup disk and Mac external hard drive, HDD, etc. The built-in disk manager tool on Mac Disk Utility can be used to format Mac hard drive without any other third party tools. How to Format a Hard Drive on macOS (macOS Sierra or Earlier) If you've made a backup, let's start formatting Mac hard drive. It helps mount iPad iPhone as a flash drive and backup your Mac data including music, videos, movies, TV shows, photos, apps, documents and more in a simple click.

I recommend using MacX MediaTrans, a lesser-known but efficient Mac file transfer and backup tool. Tips: you have lots of Mac backup software to choose from, among which Time Machine, iCloud, and MacX MediaTrans are the best bets. Thus, data backup is a must in case of data loss. It's worth mentioning that formatting a hard drive on Mac will delete all current data stored on that drive. Many users followed instructions to format Mac hard drive but ended up deleting some important data that they couldn't get back any more. Things to do before formatting Mac hard drive Reformat Mac hard drive for Windows PC as they use different file systems that won't be compatible with each other.Ģ.

you are running into macOS upgrade problems that can be solved by formatting startup disk drive on Mac.

you want to quickly delete all these unwanted programs on your Mac hard drive and install other best free applications for macOS.

you are selling your Mac computer and formatting Mac startup disk drive to make it clean and new without any personal data and information on it.

you plan to backup DVDs to Mac hard drive or store other files and need to format an external hard drive for macOS to extend storage space.

How to fprmat external drive for mac