If you connect a drive formatted in Mac to a Windows PC, you’ll be prompted to format it before use. That is to say, you are not allowed to view anything saved on it before formatting. But the question is: if you click Format disk, your data will be ruined. This post from MiniTool will introduce several useful ways to help you with that; please read carefully.
Quick Navigation :
Launch Disk Utility. Either head to Applications Utilities, or tap Command + Space and start typing. Why should you consider formatting your hard drive? You might already know the consequences of. WARNING: Formatting a disk or volume erases all the files on it. Save any files you need to another volume before formatting. In the Disk Utility app on your Mac, choose View Show All Devices. In the sidebar, select the disk you want to format to use with Windows computers. Then Super Eraser for Mac will help you completely format the selected hard drive and erase all data. Solution 2: Format hard drive under macOS 10.12 Sierra with Disk Utility. Disk Utility is a built-in app in macOS 10.12 Sierra. You can run it on your Mac, then select the hard drive to format/erase. Format Hard Drive (Mac) 1. Connect the external hard drive to the computer. Click Go on the top tool bar, and select Utilities. Open Disk Utility. Select the external hard drive on the left-hand side. Click the Partition tab. Change the Partition Layout from Current to 1 Partition.
Can You Read Mac Drive on Windows
Many people doubt that whether they can read Mac drive on Windows. Some took action: they removed the drive from Mac and connected it to a Windows PC properly. But after connecting the Mac-formatted drive to Windows, a prompt window will pop up automatically on the screen, saying that they need to format the disk before use.
Don’t Format the Drive
You should click Cancel instead of Format disk when seeing this prompt. Why? That is simply because the formatting action will damage your data saved on that drive. Is there any other way to read a Mac-formatted drive on Windows? Sure, it is; some effective ways used by other users will be shown to you later on this page.
What Does Formatting a Hard Drive Do
Some users said they clicked on the Format disk button by mistake when seeing the prompt window mentioned above; they were wondering if there’s any way to help them recover a formatted hard drive. Luckily, the answer is yes.
What does disk formatting mean?
Formatting a hard disk/drive refers to delete all the file & folders save on a drive and set a certain file system for it. The formatting action is performed to prepare a data storage device (including hard disk drive, solid-state drive, USB flash drive, and SD card) for initial use. Two of the most obvious results of formatting a hard disk are: deleting data and changing file system.
Besides, there are also other benefits of disk formatting:
Get more space on disk.
Solve disk problems caused by soft failure.
Improve disk/system performance greatly.
And so on.
Do you know how to improve Windows 10 performance effectively?
It’s necessary to improve Windows 10 performance effectively since various problems will occur inevitably on a system that has been used for a long time.
Recover Formatted Hard Drive
The first and the most important thing to do after formatting a hard drive is to recover precious data from hard drive. MiniTool Power Data Recovery can be a good data recovery assistant: it’s clean, safe, and professional. Please free download the trial edition to experience this data recovery tool first before you decide to buy it; after that, double click on the setup program to finish installing the software on your Windows computer, on which the Mac hard drives are formatted.
Follow this guide to recover data from Mac formatted external hard drives:
Click Start now at the end of installation to launch MiniTool Power Data Recovery. You can also open it by double clicking on the software icon.
Wait for a few seconds until the disk loading process is finished automatically.
Select Hard Disk Drive from the pane on your left hand side.
Choose the formatted Mac drive from the pane on your right hand side.
Double click on the target drive directly or click on the Scan button at the bottom right corner.
The full scan will be started at once; more and more files and folders will be found during the scan. Please make sure the Mac hard drive is always connected to your computer.
Browse the found items carefully to decide which files are needed and which are not; add a checkmark into the square box in from of all the files you want to recover. If you can’t confirm, go to view the content before recovery by clicking Preview.
Click on the Save button in the lower right corner.
Select a storage path in the pop-up window to store the files waiting to be recovered; please make sure it has enough free space left. (You shouldn’t select the original Mac-formatted drive as the storage location in order to avoid secondary damage.)
Click on the OK button in the same window to confirm your selection.
Then, wait until all the files saved on Mac hard drive have been recovered successfully to appointed place. A prompt window will show up to inform you of the recovery result.
MiniTool Power Data Recovery is also a great tool for recovering formatted SD card or broken/corrupted USB stick. The recovery steps are basically the same expect that you should select Removable Disk Drive from the left sidebar as mentioned in step 3.
After the data recovery process has been completed, you may transfer back the recovered files to the formatted disk as long as you can confirm that you’ve got back all the files you need.
Windows 10 Read Mac Drive
Can a Mac external drive be read on a PC?
A lot of people are wondering whether they can read Mac drive on Windows 10 with freeware. In fact, there is both free and paid software to help people read Mac drive on PC easily, without formatting the disk. I’ll introduce some of the useful software to you one by one in this part; please choose a proper hard drive reader yourself.
Note: Choice 1 ~ 3 is suitable for reading HFS & HFS+; choice 4 ~ 5 is used to read APFS on Windows.
Choice 1: HFSExplorer
HFSExplorer is completely free; it’s a basic application designed to help users read Mac-formatted hard disks and disk images. HFSExplorer gives support to various file systems: HFS (the Standard file system on Mac), HFS+ (the Extended file system on Mac OS), HFSX (the Extended Mac OS file system with case sensitive file names), etc.
What does HFSExplorer allow you to do?
Browse volumes on Mac by using a graphical file system browser.
Check the volume related information.
Extract files you need (copy files to Windows hard disk free).
Mount & read disk images like .dmg and .sparsebundle.
Create disk images from the volume on Mac.
The partition schemes including Master Boot Record, GUID Partition Table, and Apple Partition Map are supported by HFSExplorer.
Attention!
You need to install Java first if you don’t have it on your PC since it’s required (Sun's Java SE runtime environment version 5.0 or greater in which OpenJDK works fine).
HFSExplorer: Launch error
No Java runtime environment found. HFSExplorer cannot function without Java.
Press “OK” to open up http://www.java.com where you can download a Java runtime environment for your system.
You should just click OK as prompted to download & install proper runtime environment when seeing the window above.
How to use HFSExplorer to read Mac hard drive on Windows:
Connect the Mac-formatted external hard drive to the Windows computer properly.
Launch HFSExplorer as administrator on your computer.
Select File from the menu bar at the top of the opening window.
Choose Load file system from device from the submenu (you can also press Ctrl + L directly).
Click on the Autodetect button to automatically detects HFS/HFS+/HSFX partitions on your system (you can also Select a device or Specify device name manually).
Pick out the files and folders you want to view and click Extract.
Choose a folder as the destination place to store the items selected in the previous step (they’ll be copied immediately).
Expand the target folder to read files on your Windows PC.
If the connected external hard drive is not showing up on PC, you can’t detect it in step 5. You must make it appear in Windows first.
Is there any other hard drive reader for Windows? Of course, yes; please move on.
Choice 2: Apple HFS+ Drivers
Another way to access HFS + files in Windows 10 for free is installing Apple HFS + drivers.
Tip: The Apple HFS + drivers only give you read access to the files in Mac-formatted drives.
Steps to read Mac drives on PC with Apple HFS + drivers:
First, you should make sure you don’t have Paragon or MacDrive (the hard drive readers I will talk about later) on your Windows computer. If you do, please remove them now.
Second, you should download the correct Windows driver package to your local drive.
Third, you should configure your Windows as follow.
Go to the default download path (Downloads folder) to extract the downloaded zip file.
Find AppleHFS.sys and AppleMNT.sys files.
Copy them by pressing Ctrl + C (you can also do it by right clicking & choosing Copy).
Go to this path: C:WindowsSystem32drivers.
Copy them by pressing Ctrl + V (you can also right click on any blank area & choose Paste).
Navigate to the downloaded folder to find Add_AppleHFS.reg file.
Open the .reg file to bring up a Registry Editor prompt window.
Click on the Yes button and then click OK.
Restart your computer to make changes take effect.
Fourth, you should connect the Mac-formatted drive to your PC -> open File Explorer (also called Windows Explorer) -> locate that drive under This PC -> access files you want.
Tip: You may find the File Explorer has stopped working or not responding when trying to open it; please don’t be nervous since this problem can be fixed.
Choice 3: HFS+ for Windows
Though the Paragon HFS+ for Windows is a paid hard driver reader, you’ll love it after using.
What can Paragon HFS+ for Windows do for you?
The speed is fast and the performance is stable.
The Mac file systems are integrated into Windows File Explorer.
It provides full read and write access to Mac drives formatted with HFS, HFS +, and HFSX (just like other drives in Windows).
It allows Windows programs to read from or write to the Mac-formatted drive on Windows.
There are additional features that worth the cost.
How much does it cost?
The Paragon HFS+ for Windows is sold on the official website for $19.95 with a single seat license; $49.95 with one license worked on 3 PCs.
If you don’t want to spend money in reading Mac drive on Windows, you should download the trial edition; it is free for use for 10 days. You can access, copy files from or to the Mac drive during this period; it’s enough.
Choice 4: MacDrive
If your Mac drive is formatted with APFS (Apple File System), you won’t be able to read Mac hard drive on Windows because there are no free apps designed for it. But you have many choices of paid applications to access & edit Mac drive files on Windows; MacDrive is a popular one designed by Mediafour.
Merits of MacDrive:
It is used to help users read data from and write data to Mac disks from Windows directly.
You can read both APFS and HFS+ drives in File Explorer.
It allows you to create and partition Mac disks on your Windows.
A graphical interface is offered for Mac-formatted drives verification, format, and repair.
It’s a trusted solution which can date back to 1996.
Formatting External Drive For Mac
The only drawback of MacDrive seems to be the selling price is higher than some similar tools. You need to pay $49.99 for the Standard version or $69.99 for the Pro version.
Is it worth the price? Yes, if you have such needs; it also includes unique features like support for Mac-formatted RAID disks.
Choice 5: Paragon APFS for Windows
Paragon also designed an APFS for Windows app for reading APFS Mac drive on Windows; it is considered as one of the main competitors of MacDrive.
Features of Paragon APFS for Windows:
Formatting A New Hard Drive For Mac
It provides read and write access to Mac drives formatted with APFS.
It also allows you to access and edit compressed and cloned files (you can only access the encrypted volumes without making any changes).
It gives support to auto-mounting at start-up; the partition tools of MacDrive are not included in this app.
The biggest disadvantage of Paragon APFS for Windows when compared to MacDrive is the HFS+ support. The biggest advantage of Paragon APFS for Windows over MacDrive is the price – it costs only $49.95 for one license worked on 3 PCs.
Of course, there are many other tools available for you to read Mac drives on Windows (10/8/7, etc.).
Free Hard Drive Formatting Software
Bonus Tip
You can format your Mac hard drive to exFAT, which supports both Windows and Mac OS X. In this way, you can get full read and write access to exFAT drives on Windows without any additional third-party software.
The only thing you need to worry is that the data on Mac drives will be removed. So you need to turn to MiniTool Power Data Recovery as mentioned in part 1 to recover the files you need after formatting.
How to format a hard drive? Basically, there are three ways.
Right click on the drive in File Explorer -> choose Format.
Open Disk Management -> right click on the target drive -> choose Format.
Format Partition with MiniTool Partition Wizard – a professional disk manager.
Final Thoughts
Though you can’t access a Mac-formatted drive on a Windows computer directly, there are useful ways and tools to help you read Mac drive on Windows easily. Please just follow the steps mentioned above and choose the tool depending on your needs.
Most external hard drives are designed to work for Windows computers. So if you’re trying to connect an external hard drive to a Mac, you might have to format the drive before you can use it. Here’s how to do that:
How to Format a Hard Drive for Mac
Note: If you already used your external hard drive on a PC, be sure to back up any files on it. Formatting your drive will wipe out all the data in it.
Connect an external hard drive to your Mac. Some external hard drives need to be plugged into an outlet to work.
Go to Spotlight Search, type in Disk Utility, and click the first option. This will open the Disk Utility app, where you will find all the internal and external drives that are connected to your Mac.
Then click View in the top-left corner of the window and select Show All Devices.
Click the external hard drive you want to format. You can find this on the left-hand side of the screen under External Hard Drives. For the best result, select the disk (the highest option in the external tree).
On the top menu, click Erase. This will open a small pop-up window with a warning that erasing the drive will delete all data stored on it and that it can’t be undone.
Choose a name, format, and scheme for your drive. You can choose whatever name you want, and you should choose GUID Partition Map for the Scheme in most cases. However, you can choose between the following formats:
Mac OS Extended (Journaled) is the best option for most Mac users since it is compatible with all Macs.
APFS (Apple File System) is only for newer Macs running macOS 10.13 or later.
exFAT is compatible with both PC and Mac.
MS-DOS (FAT) is also compatible with Mac and PC, but you can only transfer files smaller than 4GB.
When you’re done with providing the setup details, click Erase. This will immediately wipe the entire drive.
If you get an error message that states, “Erase process has failed. Click done tocontinue,” don’t freak out about it. This is an issue caused by Time Machine running on your externaldrive.
You will need to turn off Time Machine. You can do this by opening System Preferences and unchecking the boxnext to “Back Up Automatically”.Then click Options beside “ShowTime Machine in menu bar.” This will open another window. Click Cancel and it will turn off the Time Machine.
After you turn off the Time Machine, redo steps 4 to 6.
How to Partition anExternal Hard Drive on Mac
If you have formattedyour drive, you can then partition the drive, which will splitthe drive into two formats. This is perfect for anyone who uses Macs and PCsand wants to transfer files between the different operating systems with anexternal drive. Here’s how to do that:
Open Disk Utility and select the drive that you want to partition. It is best to click View > Show All Devices so you can selectthe disk rather than a container.
In the top menu, select Partition.
Then click the plus sign at the bottom of the pie chart. Every time you click this plus sign, a new partition will becreated.
Choose a name, format and size for each partition. You can also change the size of each of the partitions bydragging the white dots at the edge of the circle.
Finally click Apply.
Why Partition a Hard Drive?
Partitioning an external hard drive allows youto have separate drives for Mac, PC, and any other operating system. Now youdon’t have to go out and buy hard drives for every computer you use.
A partition also gives you a dedicated space foryour Time Machine back-up files or a bootable backup of your operating system.It also helps protect your data if your drive gets infected with malware, as itwould be contained within one of the partitions.
Format A Hard Drive For Mac Using Windows
Now that you know how to format an external drive for Mac, check out our blog on the difference between an HDD and an SDD.