I have a seagate 500GB expansion drive which i brought about a year ago. I was using windows at that time, so i had no problem with it. Recently, I have switched to mac and saw that my hard disk was not writable on mac. One of my friends told me that I had to format the hard disk on mac, but I checked it on the internet that if we do it, we would not be able to write anything on it from windows. I have a lot of data in it and I don't want to format it without the right information. So, is there any way to make it writable both on windows AND mac????

Mac Formatting Tool

I need this as my school has windows pc's and I have a Mac, so it would be convenient that way.

It's a brand new Seagate Backup Plus, 1TB, which I plan to use as expansion & storage to augment my 256 mb, solid-state drive on a Sony Vaio; but I'd like to partition the Seagate first. On Win 8 Pro, from Control Panel System & Security Administrative Tools Create & format, etc. The OS returns Disk Management screen. In the 2nd panel, right click on Seagate Backup Plus brings up the menu on which I expected to find the option New Simple Volume; but it's not there. The others: New Spanned, Striped, Mirrored, RAID-5 volumes are all present.

What am I doing wrong? Should I reformat the Backup Plus first? External-edits folder location?. Thanks for helping. Hi Maui, Thank you for posting in Microsoft Community Forums.

As per the description, you want to know whether you have to format the Seagate Backup Plus before partitioning the hard disc. What are the options listed when you right click on the external hard disc? Does it have a drive letter assigned?

What does disk management show for the external hard disc? Is it shown as RAW, NTFS or FAT 32? Every hard drive needs to be partitioned and formatted before it can be used. If he does not have any data on the external hard disc, you may create a new partition and then format the hard disc. If it is already partitioned, then you may delete the existing partition and then create a new one.

Formatting Mac Drive For Windows

Delete the existing partition if there is no data, otherwise the data will be lost. Please follow the steps: Open Windows 8 Disk Management by pressing ' Windows + R' and typing ' diskmgmt.msc'. Right click on the hard drive partition (External hard disc Seagate) and select ' Format' in the drop-down menu. In the pop-up window, you can type a partition label; choose NTFS or FAT32 file system. I received three replies.

The one below answered my question. After deleting the exiisting volume, as suggested, option for New Simple Volume appeared. The wizard did the rest. Kudos to whoever sent me the advice.

Reply Unless you are using specialist partitioning software you can't repartition a drive without removing the existing volume. In Disk Manager you would Delete the volume then create a new one which does occupy the full disk. This would partition the drive and format the new volume and leave unallocated space to create further volumes.

If you are asking can you partition the drive without losing data already on it, with the standard Disk Manager the answer is no.