But sometimes, you need to format to exFAT for different purpose.įAT32, NTFS, exFAT are three different file system.įAT formatting is the oldest and the most experienced file system in the history of computing.

The hard drive installed Windows OS is NTFS formatted in default, and you cannot change the boot partition into FAT32 or exFAT file system. Question from exFAT is the best format for hard drive Mac and PC I have to format the hard drive into exFAT, anyone can help me to solve this thing?” It is not possible to format hard drive to exFAT formatting. The only option under the window of Format-> File system is NTFS(Default), no other option exists.

Select 'OK' in the completion window to finish.Here I’m going to ask a question: why can I not format exFAT? I have a external hard drive that can't be formatted to exFAT file system.The process will take less than a minute. Select NTFS for the File System type and check the Quick Format checkbox.NOTE: Be sure you selected the correct drive icon for the “My Passport” external drive. Right click on the drive icon for the external drive and choose ' Format' from the menu.In Windows 8, you can choose the 'This PC' tile from the start screen.In Windows 7, this can be done by clicking the start button and choosing 'Computer' from the right panel of the menu.Open ' Computer' (there are multiple ways this can be done).Connect the external drive to the computer.If you have already saved files to the drive that you want to keep then don’t format the drive. WARNING: All data on the external hard drive will be erased by this procedure. NTFS partitions have a file size limit only limited by the partition size. To get around this problem or prevent it from being a problem later you could format the drive as an NTFS partition. You could save the file to an NTFS partition or a DVD. When trying to copy files to the drive you may get prompted to do a disk clean up but this will not resolve the problem. This may be a problem for larger files, such as video files, disk images, or large Outlook PST files. The maximum file size on a FAT32 partition is 4gb.

A new Western Digital external drive is configured by default out of the box as a FAT32 partition.

Format hard drive to ntfs on mac