How to Format External Hard Drive on Mac

Step 1: From your Mac, launch Disk Utility. You can either go to Applications > Utilities or tap Command + Space and start typing Disk Utility.

Step 2: In Disk Utility, you will have a list of available drives on the left. You can select the drive which you would like to format.

Caution: Formatting your external drive will erase all your Data. Backup your Data first with Time Machine before doing the formatting.

Step 3: From the main window, under Disk Utility > Click on Erase.

Step 4: Disk Utility will automatically select the format for you from the available list and format an external hard drive for Mac. This might be APFS or Mac OS Extended (Journaled). It depends on how your drive is currently formatted. You can anytime click on the formatting options to reveal the drop-down window. Choose your format according to how you may need to use the formatted drive. My suggestion is ExFAT, because it is a format full compatible with macOS and Windows.

Step 5: Now the next step is to give a name to the drive. You can give any name of your choice but choose a name that can indicate what type of files you will have in there.

Step 6: Then click on the Security Options button. Now another window will pop up, which will allow you to choose how you would like to format your drive. This option will come up with a slider, which will range from fastest to most secure.

Important note: This step is crucial to make sure the files in the drive are safely erased.

Step 7: It will completely erase the drive information; however, underlying files intact might be hidden there. In other words, you, or someone else can resurrect the files by using any paid data recovery software. If you want entirely to erase everything from your external hard drive, you can move the slider to the next second option "This option writes a single pass of zeros over the entire disk". It will completely overwrite the whole drive with all data erased.

Step 8: If you have sensitive data in your external hard drive and want to format it completely, you can continue moving the slider to the right. In the next step, you will have the option to overwrite the drive 3x times. Scrolling this option to most secure will overwrite the drive seven times. You might need to wait for a while (depending on the drive's size) before it's available to use again.

Step 9: Now moving to the final steps, click on Erase and wait for a while. Give some time for the data to be erased, and the drive is ready to use again.

Step 10: Voila! You are all set up to move your valuable data to your freshly formatted Hard Drive on Mac.

Step 1: To format external hard drive on Mac, Connect the USB drive to Mac and Hit CMD + along with Space key to run Spotlight. Now write "Terminal" in the search bar and press Enter.

Step 2: After the Terminal window is opened, type “diskutil list," and then you will know your USB Drive.

Step 3: Now type the command – "sudo diskutil eraseDisk FAT32 MBRFormat /dev/disk2".

For your information:

• Sudo (username)
• diskutil (disk utility)
• EraseDisk command (format)
• FAT32 (file system)
• MBRFormat (Manages the Disk utility to utilize Master Boot Record to format)
• /dev/disk2 (location of your drive)

Step 4: Now, wait for a while to let the process finish.

Step 5: Then type "diskutil list" again to take a look at the formatting procedure. This step is done to make sure whether the formatting is done correctly or not.

Step 6: Now, you are all set up to use USB with the FAT32 file system on your Mac.

First, download and install the software in your Mac and start the software. From the home window of the software, you can select your desired file types or just keep all the file types selected. Then click the "Start" button to proceed.

Next you need to connect the external hard drive with your Mac. Then select the external hard drive and hit the "Scan" button. Now the scanning process will start immediately.

When the scanning process is complete, you will get to preview all the lost data from the external drive. You can select all the data that you need to recover and click on the "Recover" button to recover the files. You can also use the "Deep Scan" mode if normal scanning doesn’t list all the files you lost in the software preview window.