Format external hard drive

RandomRunner · May 13, 2014

What is the best method to format an external hard drive so that it will work on Mac and PC (other than making FAT32 )

zapsyou · May 13, 2014

ExFat works with both and has no limitations, you can format it through windows or mac.

RandomRunner · May 13, 2014

Thankyou

Sigilist · May 16, 2014

I do not recommend exFAT at this time if you are in OSX 10.9+. I have tried this on multiple drives and then installed Fuse in both the latest Ubuntu and LinuxMint. Both failed to mount the drive after it was used in OSX. Error reports showed that OSX put a Time Machine stub in the drive (even with TM fully disabled) and corrupted the partition table.

As a side point, with Fuse installed, you can format exFAT in Linux as well. Your better choice if using only Windows and OSX is to use FAT32, though this will not keep your drive safe from tampering by OSX 10.9+ (At this time, I have not test this setup with earlier editions of OSX.)