Wait for the process to complete to successfully reformat your hard drive from Mac to PC. Choose exFAT for the Format, and GUID Partition Map (known as GPT to Windows users) for the Scheme.

In the dialogue box that appears, choose the Name, Format, and Scheme of your drive. Then, click the Erase button at the top-right corner of the screen. On the left sidebar, click the hard drive you want to format for Windows. Open Disk Utility by opening Finder > Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility. Click to jump back to the backup section. There’s no way around it, so make sure that you have already backed up your data to a different drive and not the one you’re trying to format. Please remember that formatting your drive will delete your data. Fortunately, macOS has a free native tool called “Disk Utility” that can take care of the entire process. To do this, you’ll first need to erase it. Once you’ve safely backed up your data, you can proceed with formatting your drive. Next, choose how many bytes of the drive you want to back up using the numbered range dropdowns menus. On the window that appears, select where you want to save backup and whether you want to format your backup by bytes or sectors (bytes is fine for most cases). Select the drive you want to backup, then click Create backup.

On the left sidebar under Extra Tools, click Byte-to-Byte Backup. Next, navigate to the Applications folder, then double-click Disk Drill. To open Disk Drill, first open the Finder app from your Dock. If you don’t want to use your OS drive for your backup files, plug in another storage media (not the one you’re formatting). So the first thing you have to do is back up your data.įor this guide, we’ll be using Disk Drill – it’s a data recovery tool that offers a free backup feature (as well as a data recovery tool, which we’ll be covering later in the guide). I can’t stress enough that it means that you’ll be wiping all the files and folders from that hard drive – there’s no other way to do it. In order to format a Mac drive for Windows, you’ll first need to erase it. The data recovery tool we’ll be using, called Disk Drill, can recover data even from formatted drives.

How to Convert Mac Hard Drive to Windowsįor this process, you’ll need 3 tools: a backup utility, a tool to recover data (just in case), and Disk Utility for the actual formatting process – fortunately, macOS already comes with Disk Utility installed. Remember: reformatting a Mac hard drive for Windows completely wipes all the files and folders on it – so you’ll need to do some preparation.

Disk formats for windows and mac