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- #How to read external mac drive on windows 10 mac os x
- #How to read external mac drive on windows 10 install
- #How to read external mac drive on windows 10 windows 10
When DOS was born, popular hard drives only had 5MB or 10MB of storage space, which you could fill today with a single animated GIF. In 1996, Microsoft introduced FAT32 to handle much larger hard drives, and FAT32 is still in common use. However, hard drives keep getting bigger - now they are typically 500GB to 4TB - and in 2006, Microsoft released a new extended version, exFAT. In theory, this can handle drives up to 64 zettabytes, though 512TB is the recommended maximum. Hard drives will have to double in size another seven times to reach that. If your dad’s new 4TB EHD (external hard drive) has been formatted in FAT32 or exFAT, then both his PC and your Mac should be able to read it. All updated versions of Windows XP and later versions of Windows support both FAT32 and exFAT.
#How to read external mac drive on windows 10 mac os x
Apple already supported FAT32 and it added support for exFAT in Mac OS X 10.6.5 (Snow Leopard) and later versions of OS X. Mac to PC file transfer using an ethernet cableĮven if the 4TB drive has been formatted in Windows’ NTFS (New Technology File System) format, then your Mac should still be able to read it, though it won’t be able to write to it.
#How to read external mac drive on windows 10 windows 10
#Read mac drive on windows 10 mac os x#Īpple added read-only support for NTFS in 2003 with Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) and many Mac users need it for running Windows under Boot Camp. Your dad can check the format of his 4TB EHD by running Windows Explorer and selecting Computer in the left-hand pane. All the PC’s drives will be shown in the right-hand pane. If he right-clicks on the 4TB drive and selects Properties from the drop-down menu, the Properties sheet will have an entry for “File System” that will usually be NTFS or FAT32. However, if both of you want to read and write to this particular EHD, I suggest reformatting it in exFAT while it’s still empty. You should then be able to copy files to it with your Mac. If your Mac still refuses to recognise it, you can tell it to initialise the drive as an MS-DOS disk (ie FAT32). Meanwhile, your external hard drive is probably formatted in a version of Apple’s Hierarchical File System (HFS).
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Windows PCs won’t normally read that without an additional software driver, such as Erik Larsson’s HFSExplorer or the DiskInternals Linux Reader. (It’s a Windows program that reads Linux and Mac disks.) Both are free.
#How to read external mac drive on windows 10 install
So, you could use your Mac to copy the files to your dad’s 4TB FAT32/exFAT drive, or your dad could install a free HFS+ driver and use his PC to read them from your Mac drive. I don’t know which would be simpler, but if the first one doesn’t work, you can try the second.įinally, although an external hard drive is a good way to move files from a Mac to a PC, there are other ways to do it. The most obvious solution is to use a USB Flash drive. This can get tedious, depending on how much data you need to move.