

Ready for your walk through? Let’s format your drive. Then read my article “ External Hard Drive Compatible with Mac & PC without Reformatting” to find out how to do that. And if they are important files you’ll be seeking the services of a data recovery company to recover data.īut, if you’d prefer not to reformat your drive. Because after formatting those files will be gone.


And you want to use that software.Ĭopy those files off first. Or you know that your brand new external hard drive comes with software installed on it. If the drive you want to format has files on it. Or reformatting an external hard disk for your Mac means you’ll lose any files already on the drive.įor instance. There are two separate versions listed on the Seagate site, one for macOS 10.10 to 10.15, and another for the Macs running an Apple silicon chip.Formatting. Or, if you bought an external hard drive from Seagate, it should come with Paragon Driver to let you read and write data interchangeably on Windows and Mac without formatting the drive. You can use a third-party app to write to an NTFS disk on a Mac. As a consequence, you won’t be able to add, change, or delete files. On macOS, you can only read disks in this format, not write to them. Is your external hard drive showing up as “read only” on your Mac? This usually happens because the drive is formatted with Microsoft’s NTFS file format. Here’s a guide to macOS disk permissions to help you understand the technical concepts. This lets you set the permissions to Read & Write to yourself while keeping the read-only for other users. If this is a drive you formatted yourself, you can change the individual permissions in the box above. You won’t see this option if the external storage is used as a boot drive or a Time Machine backup drive.
