mac create partition on external hard drive

How much room will you need on the drive for the stuff you share with your colleagues? You know, the stuff you don’t want to share with the kids.įinally add a bit of head room for the creation of the partitions. What size are they?Īdd them up and you’ll find out how much room you need. Take a look at the folders both on your Mac and on the Windows PCs. Think about the stuff you plan to share with the kids. Choose an external hard drive large enough to hold the things you want to share. Sounds obvious but I am going to say it anyway. It’s as easy as pie and when you’re done, head back here.ī. Take a look at my post on formatting here by clicking on the link.Īnd follow the short steps to creating a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) file system. You can buy an external hard drive already formatted as HSF+ or take a few minutes and make it that way yourself.

It’s simply a disk layout that a Mac computer uses. Don’t let this technical sounding jargon worry you. When you’re creating a partition for Mac and Windows to share, you need your external hard drive formatted as a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) file system. Your faithful Mac creates the partitions on your external hard drive.īut before we jump straight in, there are some things you need to have in place before you begin. How To Partition An External Hard Drive For Mac And Windows Why Is The Shared Partition For Mac And Windows Created As ExFAT?

What Happens When You Plug Your External Hard Drive Into Your Colleague Or Kids Windows PC?.

Choosing A File System For Your Partition To Partition The External Hard Drive For Mac And Windows PC Pick The External Hard Drive You're Going To Partition For Mac And Windows You'll Be Using A Piece Of Software Called Disk Utility

Creating The Partition for Mac And Windows.

How To Partition An External Hard Drive For Mac And Windows.

If you don’t want to proceed with partitioning the disk, click Cancel.Īfter the operation finishes, click Done.Īfter you partition a storage device, an icon for each volume appears in both the Disk Utility sidebar and the Finder sidebar. If you want to proceed with partitioning the disk, click Continue.

If a dialogue appears that indicates it will take a long time to resize the startup volume, read the information in the dialogue, then do one of the following: Read the information in the Partition Device dialogue, then click Partition. Type a name for the volume in the Name field.įor MS-DOS (FAT) and ExFAT volumes, the maximum length for the volume name is 11 characters.Ĭlick the Format pop-up menu, then choose a file system format.Įnter the size or drag the resize control to increase or decrease the size of the volume. Note: If you click Add Volume instead, you can click the Add button to create an additional APFS volume in the container, or click Cancel to return to the Disk Utility window without making any changes to the storage device.

Mac create partition on external hard drive