Use Disk Utility to Format an External Drive. After you connect an external drive to your Mac, open the Applications folder from the Finder window. The Disk Utility application is located in the Utilities sub-folder. Launch Disk Utility and then click to select the external hard drive listed on the left.
8% in 6 hours does not sound right. Do the following Go to Start All Programs Accessories Command Prompt. Right click on Command Prompt and 'Run as Administrator'. Into the black window type: chkdsk /f Then press Enter. That will run for a while and fix any bad sectors. When that is done, run these commands in the same window - each followed by Enter Diskpart List disk Select disk n (where n is the number that was given in List Disk for your disk in question) Format /fs:NTFS Quick When that is done, continue in the same window Select disk n (same as above) Create partition primary And still in the same window List volume Select volume n (n is probably 0) Assign letter=M (or any other higher letter ) Exit Now you should have a volume with one partition M that should show in Computer. @WHS @Germ-X.
Thanks people but no luck. The list volume worked. The info is: Volume 5, (LTR) F, no info under Label, (Fs) RAW, (Type) Partition, (Size) 298GB, (Status) Healthy. Then DISKPART came up and I did the following: DISKPART Select Volume 5 Volume 5 is the slected volume DISKPART Format /fs:NTFS Quick The arguments specified for this command for not valid. For more info type HELP FORMAT DISKPART HELP FORMAT blah blah.A volume must be selected for this operation to succeed Examples: FORMAT FS=NTFS LABEL='NEW vOLUME' QUICK COMPRESS FORMAT RECOMMENDED OVERRIDE This is where I am up to so far and I did do the chkdsk so I presume the hardware on the external hard drive is OK. Help is much appreciated.
The latest in the saga: Diskpart Select disk 1 Disk 1 is now the selected disk. Diskpart Clean all DiskPart has encountered an error. The remote procedure call failed. See the System Event Log for more information. I WENT TO THE SYSTEM EVENT LOG AND IT HAS THESE ENTRIES: ERROR: The Virtual Disk service terminated unexpectedly. It has done this 1 time(s). The following corrective action will be taken in 60000 milliseconds: Restart the service.
![Formatting Formatting](/uploads/1/2/5/3/125370018/954763424.png)
INFORMATION: The WinHTTP Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Service service entered the running state. INFORMATION: SerVIce started. INFORMATION: The Virtual Disk service entered the running state.
INFORMATION: The Multimedia Class Scheduler service entered the stopped state. Thank you everybody. But in a VERY STRANGE way.
This is what happened. I downloaded PW and clicked on create partition and then format partition (Other options were greyed out). I was told the operation was successful. I went to computer management and looked at disk management.
It still told me the volume was RAW. I repeated STEP 1 and rebooted but still the volume showed up as raw.
Then I clicked on create partition but this time I set the size at only 50GB (my drive is 300GB). Gave it a new drive letter (not F:).
Formatted the partition. So I got greedy and resized the partition to 298GB. PW says the operation was successful but disk management told me the volume was RAW. So I repeated Step 3 with the 50GB size. It worked again. Then I thought I would be smart. I created a new partititon with 225GB and gave it a new drive letter.
The new partition worked but the old 50GB partition turned RAW again. I started from scratch. Deleted the entire volume and began again with PW. I still put in two partitions but sized 50GB and 138GB. I conclude there must be some bad sectors that chkdsk could not fix. That is why when I tried formatting the entire external hard drive it did not work. CURIOUSLY: 1.
On disk management, it shows I now have four partitions. The two that I had set up.
And two more: One that says 78GB of free space and one that says 27GB unallocated. On PW, it shows I have four partitions. Two with drive letters that I had set up. And THREEadditional partitions each labelled.: (asterisk-colon). File system is unallocated and type is logical.
I might not have all the 300GB back but I am very very happy to have more than half of it back. So thank you again everyone. I really appreciate you all taking the time to help.
You can format your external hard drive from either the PC or Mac. Just keep in mind if you want to use your drive also for OS X’s Time Machine backups, we advise you to format your drive through Mac because there is an additional step to make drive compatible with “Time Machine Backups”. And you can only do this with exFAT as with FAT32 Mac OS X’s Time Machine backup won’t work. FAT32 or exFAT? You can format your external hard drive in both – exFAT and FAT32.
They both will work just fine. Mac and PC can read and write on both. However, each of these filesystems has their own pros and cons. FAT32 has a maximum 4GB file size limit, but exFAT can work with files as large as 16EB, that’s more than you will ever need. If you have to work with large video clips, games or any other kind of massive files, FAT32 may not be the best choice. Many still choose FAT32 over exFAT despite its slower performance, as it’s also compatible with Linux Os and is supported on many consoles. Once you have done with formatting, your external hard drive will be able to write and read files from both a PC and Mac.
The resulting FAT32 file system will be compatible with all versions of Mac OS X, and Windows including back to 95. This is one of the most widely recognized file system formats. FAT32 – a file system normally used on USB disks.
exFAT – a newer file system optimized for flash devices and has improved performance overFAT32 Why I can’t use NTFS on Mac? The default file system for Windows is NTFS (New Technology File System). Macs that run Snow Leopard or Lion can read data from drives that are formatted as NTFS. However, they can’t write. To make your Mac compatible writing on NTFS you have to get and install a third-party driver. So in the end, it’s possible to make your NTFS external hard drive compatible with Mac. But we advise to just format it to “FAT” file system as it’s less time consuming and easier.
Windows 7 can’t read nor write files to external drives that are formatted as HFS. To do so you also have to install third-party like. How to format an External Drive in Windows 1) Connect the drive to your Windows PC. 2) Open Disk Management. 3) Right click on unallocated or any other disk partition and select “ New Simple Volume” 4) Choose your desired size 5) Assign your external hard drive with any letter. 6) Choose exFAT as the file system. 7) Follow the instructions and at the end click “ Finish“ How to Format an External Drive in OS X 1) Connect your external hard drive to the Mac.
2) Open Disk Utility. You can do this quickly by pressing CMD and the spacebar at the same time. Then type in “Disk Utility”. 3) Select the drive you want to format. 4) Click the Partition tab. 6) Change the Partition Layout from Current to 1 Partition.
7) Click Options, Select Master Boot Record, and click OK. 8) Name the hard drive with a name of your choice. 9) Click the Format drop-down menu. 10) Select exFAT or MS-DOS FAT(FAT32). 11) At last press Apply, then click on Partition. WD My Book would be best for desktop, Seagate Backup Plus Slim would be one of the best portable hard drives.
Both are all-around decent drives and will do fine for any backup, pictures included. As for cross-platform encryption, if you intend to use the same drive on both Mac and Windows, the best option would be using a cross-platform compatible encryption tool, like, while formatting the drive in exFAT to avoid compatibility issues. This is because Windows won’t recognize Mac’s native encryption and vice versa. VeraCrypt is well-renowned, so it should function well without any problems, just be prepared to learn how to use the tool. Try testing this setup with just a couple files before you perform entire backups.