external hard drive for mac and windows 10

#External hard drive for mac and windows 10 how to
#External hard drive for mac and windows 10 drivers
#External hard drive for mac and windows 10 portable
#External hard drive for mac and windows 10 software
#External hard drive for mac and windows 10 download

If the drive has become corrupt or has bad sectors, these tools can fix it. You can also read my previous post on checking your hard drive for errors for more information and more tools to test hard drives. Western Digital DataLifeguard Diagnostic Fujitsu (Toshiba) Diagnostic Utility Just about all the major brands like Seagate, Western Digital, Toshiba, etc., have these diagnostic tools.

#External hard drive for mac and windows 10 download

If it appears that there is a problem with the drive itself, you can try to download the diagnostic tools from the drive manufacturer. If the drive doesn’t work on another computer, it’s highly likely something is wrong with the drive itself. The only way you can really tell if the problem is with the computer or the hard drive at this point is to connect the drive to another computer. If you are connecting to a USB hub, disconnect that and try to connect the drive directly to the computer. You can also try plugging the drive into another USB port on the computer to make sure it’s not a problem with that particular port. Windows tries to blame the device for malfunctioning, but it’s normally a problem with Windows.

#External hard drive for mac and windows 10 how to

If you connect your USB drive to Windows and get a USB Device Not Recognized error, make sure to check out the link on how to fix that particular problem.

#External hard drive for mac and windows 10 portable

In addition to Portable Devices, you can expand out Disk Drives and try to uninstall the device from there if it is not showing up properly in Windows Explorer.

Restart your computer and try to connect the hard drive again. Once you do that, open Device Manager (Start and type in device manager) and then click on View – Show Hidden Devices.Įxpand out Portable Devices, right-click on any items that are grayed out and choose Uninstall. You can try fixing this by first going to the command prompt (Start and type in CMD) and running the following command: set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1

#External hard drive for mac and windows 10 drivers

Sometimes old drivers can cause a device to malfunction when connected to Windows. Let’s start with some common problems and their solutions.

#External hard drive for mac and windows 10 software

If you connect the drive to the computer and nothing happens, one of several things could be going on: your hard drive might have a problem, the correct software or drivers are not installed on your system, or there is something not working properly with the operating system. When you format a drive in OS X using Disk Utility, you can also choose the exFAT format if you like. In Windows, you can choose exFAT as the file system format in addition to NTFS and FAT32. You’ll have to be running OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) or higher or Windows XP or higher. It’s newer and supports much larger files, but only works with newer versions of OS X and Windows. If you need support for bigger files, then you should use the exFAT format. You can read my previous post on how to format an external hard drive using FAT32. So what’s the best format to use so that you can see your hard drive on multiple operating systems? The legacy format that is most compatible is FAT32, but it limits you to only 4 GB for max file size. Make sure you connect the drive to the appropriate operating system and backup any data that you might need before performing a format. If you see this message, it just means that Windows does not recognize the file system on the drive. When you connect a HFS+ formatted drive to Windows, you’ll get a message stating that the drive needs to be formatted in order to be used. The only other option is to format the hard drive and use the FAT32 format for the best compatibility. You can get Windows to do it, but you have to purchase third-party software.

Windows is worse in the sense that it cannot even read or write to HFS+ formatted volumes by default. Now OS X can read and write to FAT32 formatted drives, but can only read NTFS volumes. When it comes to file formats, there are a couple of major formats that are used about 99% of the time: FAT32 and NTFS for Windows and HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) for Macs. Scroll down to the Not Showing Up section below. If the drive is not showing up in Disk Management or Disk Utility at all, you have some other type of problem. If the drive has a file system not recognized by OS X, you’ll need to erase it and the format it using FAT or HFS+. If the drive is showing here, but not on the OS X desktop, then click First Aid to try and repair the drive. If not, go to Disk Utility and check to see if it appears under the heading External. On Macs, the drive should automatically appear on the desktop. If the drive is showing, but you’re getting messages about the drive needing to be formatted, etc., then read the next section below. Pick a letter for your drive and you should be good to go.