The partitions are now ready for use for backing up your information. They should be labeled “Mac” and “Windows” (or whatever you named your partitions) accordingly. When the process is complete, you will see two separate drives appear on your desktop. You will get a box asking you to confirm the partitions. For size I allocated the remaining 12.45GB left on the drive. Name it, choose the format, and choose the size: Now click on the second partition listed in the box. For Size, you will want to choose how much space you want to designate on the drive for this partition.
For Format, be sure to choose the option of Mac OS Extended (Journaled). I labeled my first partition “Mac” just to make it easy on myself in differentiating between the two partitions. Now you will want to name your partitions, select a format, and designate a size: In the right box, choose the option for Partition.Ĭlick on the + sign to choose how many partitions you want to add. In the left box, highlight the drive you want to partition (in my example it is the JetFlash 32GB drive). Click on the drive when it appears on your desktop. Plug your external drive into a USB spot on your computer.
How to format an external drive into multiple partitions using a Mac Before beginning, make sure to back up any important files that are already on your external drive onto another computer, as they will be deleted from the external drive in this process.
There is no need to purchase two separate external drives for the computers.īelow are instructions on how to set up an external drive or large capacity USB flash drive into two partitions.
This means that I can plug my external drive into my Mac and use one partition successfully for my Time Machine snapshots, then take the same external drive over to my Windows PC and use a different partition to back up my files there. By creating two partitions, I can designate one for use on Mac and set it to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format, then designate the other for use on Windows machines and set it to exFAT. One solution is to create two partitions on a single external drive. Conversely, the traditional Windows file systems (NTFS, exFAT, FAT32) are not usable by Time Machine for creating backups. This works great for Mac, but then the entire drive is not usable by Windows computers. The problem with Time Machine though is that it only reads the Mac OS Extended (Journaled) file system, or HFS. I like Time Machine because it is easy to use and makes a complete backup without having to individually go in and manually set up the files you want to back up. Mac uses Time Machine as its backup software, which is a very good program that takes a snapshot and backs up your entire computer. Anything that I need on both OS's goes into the Fat32 volume, and everything else on the HFS, as I use OSX mostly.I have an external drive that I want to use to back up files on both my Mac and my Windows PC. This is what I do- I have a HFS and a Fat32 partition. While hard drives that connect over USB 3.0 are reasonably fast, with this one you should get double that speed. Option C: Partition the drive into a few partitions using disk utility. For the best external hard drive speeds on a Mac, you need something that'll use that super-fast Thunderbolt connection, so look no further than the Buffalo MiniStation Thunderbolt. I'm sure someone else can suggest some good programs which will do this for free.
MacDrive is one such application but you have to pay for anything more than the trial version Option B: There are some programs which allow Windows to read and write to HFS drives. Is there a limitation on the max partition size for Fat32 or did I just imagine it? I'm not exactly sure, but someone else may be able to enlighten you. There are limitations on max file sizes and maybe some other stuff. Option A: Format the whole drive in Fat32. OSX can read but not write to NTFS formatted drives (the Windows format), but Windows won't even recognise HFS (the Mac Format). The only format that will work with both OSX and Windows is Fat32.