Internal drives do not ship pre-formatted and will need to be Partitioned and formatted before being used.Please refer to Answer ID 25242: How To Format an External Drive or Memory Card to Out of Box and OS Compatability. External hard drives come pre-formatted and ready for use.Finally, click on Apply to start formatting. Instead, FAT32 can be used with any operating system.Note that NTFS is only compatible with Windows and ext3 is only compatible with Linux-based systems.Next, choose the file system with which you will format the disk.In the window that opens, right-click on the external hard drive and select Format.Then, go to Dash, type gparted and click on GParted partition editor.

On your desktop, right-click on the disk icon and select Volume Dismount.

Next, connect the external hard drive to a USB port on your device.

Open the Terminal, and run sudo apt-get install gparted ntfsprogs to install the GParted utility.

How to format an external hard drive in Linux?

Enter a name for your unit in the Name field, and click Delete to start formatting.

Display the menu to the right of Format, and choose the file system with which you will format the disk.

In Disk Utility, select your external hard drive and click the Delete tab. Next, open the Disk Utility tool, which is located in the Applications > Utilities.

Connect the external hard drive to a USB port on your Mac.

How to format an external hard drive on Mac? The time it takes will depend on the size of the disk.

After accepting, formatting will begin.Note that NTFS is compatible with Windows only exFAT is compatible with Windows and Mac.In the window that opens, enter a name for your disk and choose the file system with which you will format it.In the disk manager window, right-click on the external hard drive and select Format.Press the Windows + X keys, and then select Disk Management.How to format an external hard drive in Windows? Before formatting the hard disk, it is advisable to make a back-up copy of the information contained therein, since the formatting will delete all of the data.

Format hard drive in mac