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.

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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.

I get this question a lot – I have an external hard drive that is NTFS formatted (Windows format), and I want to reformat it for my Mac (HFS). How do I do that? And you know what? It’s not nearly as easy as it should be! There is one trick to it that is not intuitive.

So how DO you do it? First Plug the drive in to your Mac.

Then open the Disk Utility that is located in the Utilities folder of your Applications folder. You will see your internal drive in your Mac, as well as any other storage devices that are connected.

For this exercise, it is best to DISCONNECT any and all external storage devices, so you only have the one that you wish to format connected. That way you will protect yourself from inadvertently re-formatting the wrong drive. You must still be careful in your selection of which drive to format, as you certainly don’t want to format one of your internal drives.

When you see the drives listed down the right hand side of the Disk Utilities window, you will see at least two entries for each physical hard drive. The first is the physical drive itself. What appear underneath the physical drive are the individual partitions. Most drives are formatted into a single partition, so you will normally see only one entry underneath a physical drive entry. But that is not always the case, so don’t be surprised, or think there is something wrong, if you see more than one entry under a physical drive. For the purpose of reformatting, you need to start by selecting the PHYSICAL drive that you wish to reformat.

In my example here (shown in the pictures here), I will be reformatting the drive shown as ‘298.1 GB Seagate FreAge.’. You can see at the bottom of the first image that this drive is formatted as Windows NT File System (NTFS). We want it to be Mac HFS formatted. Once you have selected the PHYSICAL drive, then click on the Partition tab at the top of the window. You will then need to click on the down arrow under the heading ‘Volume Scheme’ to indicate how many partitions you wish this newly formatted drive to have.

Again, the standard is one, and that is what is shown here in the images. On a Mac, they system will automatically try to format any partition to Mac OS Extended (Journaled). You will see this indicated on the right hand side of the image, labeled ‘Format’. This can be changed if desired, but for this exercise this is exactly the format we want.

Now for the tricky part. When you start with a drive that has been formatted for a Windows system, there is another part that must be changed, and that can be found by clicking on the Options button located underneath the Partitions window. (Each partition can be named separately). When you click on that Options button, you will see the screen shown here.

Notice that this screen defaults to Master Boot Record – this is the existing Windows NTFS format that is on the drive. And this must be changed in order to successfully format this drive for a Mac. There are two other options here – GUID Partition Table and Apple Partition Table. There are good descriptions here of which to use for what specific Mac product you wish to optimize this drive for. For most new formats, you will want to choose the top selection – GUID Partition Table. Once you select this, click the OK button, and you are now ready to actually partition and format your drive.

After you hit Apply on the Partition Scheme window, you are returned to the prior window showing your devices. You might now want to change the name of the partition that you are about to create. Under the heading ‘Volume Information’ in the upper right, simply type in the name you would like to use in the Name field (it defaults to ‘Untitled-1’). There are some rules about naming, and the system will inform you as you enter the name. From here, click on Apply and the system will partition and format your drive for use with your Mac.

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When you hit the Apply button, there will be one more screen for you to confirm that you indeed want to partition and format this drive, as it will remove any and all data that is on that drive. Please be sure you are formatting the right drive! That’s really all there is to it. That one trick – the Options screen – is what usually catches people up when trying to change a drive from a Windows format to a Mac format. Happy formatting!

Ian, Great question. Yes, you could indeed partition your new FreeAgent Go to have both an NTFS partition AND an HRS partition. This is not a typical solution, but it can be done. I would recommend you create the partitions on the Mac, and set the one that you will eventually want as NTFS as FAT (so you can then reformat that on your PC).

Please be aware though – your PC will never be able to see the HFS partition. The Mac will be able to see and read from the NTFS partition, but not write to it. I hope this helps!

Hi there, I have and had Windows based PCs and laptops since. Now I just had enough and wish to change to Mac. I wish it would be as easy to just buy a new machine and done but I want my TB worth of photos and other file to be transfered safely. I have purchased a Freagent Go USB 2.0 and been told that Mac will see this even though its been formated to NTFS. I had my doubts but anyway I have it now and wish to transfer data.

Obviously the above mentioned re-formating won’t help as it would erase all my datad from the drive, but can any1 tell me, what would be the best solution, without writing 100s of DVDs or aven Blu-Rays if that would be an option at all. Hi Jon, I recently bought a 320GB Seagate free agent, which I bought specifically to work on my PC laptop and Mac. The sales assistant assured me that it worked for both! While at uni I use a Mac and it crashed!making all my files read only. A friend re formatted on his Mac book pro, (big mistake) as I am now missing the NTFS formatting which I’m guessing I need to work on my PC laptop. I read that if I use over 4GB on the free agent using a Mac that it’s likly to crash!so now I can use if for my mac, but can’t sync files from my PC laptop. Can you help me show the reverse of this article, (need a NTFS partition)?

Thank you: ). I’ll add my voice to the chorus of thanks! I bought one drive, tried to format/erase/initialize or just use the thing, and managed to mess up the directory (I think) to the point where it wouldn’t show up on a Windows computer either. I took it back to the store (hey, Fry’s – that drive might be OK after all) and got another one – since it behaved the same as the first, I made sure not to do anything to it until I tried your method. It’s now formatted, and happily swallowing all the backup data I’m dumping on it! Thanks again! On the back of the Seagate Expansion you will find a power input and a USB 3.0 jack.

Using this hard drive is very simple on Windows operating systems – You merely plug in the power cord and USB 3.0 lead and off you go, this is thanks to the fact that the hard drive comes pre-setup to use for Windows users. If you want to use the Seagate Expansion on a mac, you only need to reformat it using the Disk Utility in your Mac operating system and voila. If you don’t know how to do this, take a look at the following Seagate page and follow their easy to follow steps:.