This guide will walk you through how to format a drive for Mac OS on a Windows computer.

Important Info on Drives

• For stability and performance, most drives need reformatting. New drives often come with unnecessary partitions or bloatware; others are in the wrong format.
• Formatting your drive with a single MacOS Extended partition is the best way to achieve cross-platform compatibility.
  • The PPC recommends using MacDrive to access your Mac-formatted drives on Windows.
• Note that formatting a drive will erase everything on the drive. If you have files that you need to preserve, move them to a different drive before proceeding.
• It is recommended to name your drive based on your NetID (e.g. abc123).
  • Only use letters, numbers, and underscores in the name of your drive.

To Check a Drive’s Format:

1.  Open File Explorer from the taskbar.
2. Navigate to This PC on the sidebar (or any view in which you can see your external hard drive).
3. Right click on your external hard drive and choose Properties
4. Look on the General tab for File System to find the drive format. 
   1. Note: If you have MacDrive installed and the drive is already formatted for Mac, it will say HFS+ or HFS plus.

To Format a Drive Using MacDrive:

To format a drive for use with macOS:

1. Launch MacDrive 11 and click the Create Mac volume button.

2. Click to select your drive from the Modify Mac volumes list.

3. Click the Initialize disk button.

4. Click Automatically create an HFS+ volume. Then click the Initialize disk button.

5. In the Format complete popup window, click Close.

Renaming a Drive

By default, MacDrive will name your newly formatted drive as “Untitled”. To correct this:

1. Open MacDrive 11 to see the Untitled Drive. Click the Open button.

2. Right click the drive in the sidebar of and choose Rename.

3. Type your desired drive name in the text field and hit the Enter key on the keyboard.