Most drives are formatted into a single partition, so you will normally see only one entry underneath a physical drive entry. What appear underneath the physical drive are the individual partitions. When you see the drives listed down the right hand side of the Disk Utilities window, you will see at least two entries for each physical hard drive. You must still be careful in your selection of which drive to format, as you certainly don’t want to format one of your internal drives.
That way you will protect yourself from inadvertently re-formatting the wrong drive. For this exercise, it is best to DISCONNECT any and all external storage devices, so you only have the one that you wish to format connected. You will see your internal drive in your Mac, as well as any other storage devices that are connected. Then open the Disk Utility that is located in the Utilities folder of your Applications folder. There is one trick to it that is not intuitive.įirst… Plug the drive in to your Mac. How do I do that?Īnd you know what? It’s not nearly as easy as it should be! I get this question a lot – I have an external hard drive that is NTFS formatted (Windows format), and I want to reformat it for my Mac (HFS).
