

A little window will appear, change the format to NTFS, and click the “Start” button.Windows 10 on a MacBook | Credit: Anthony Boyd Once connected, right click the partition titled “WIN DRIVE” (or whatever you named it in step 7), and click “Format”.ġ2. Now next step is to eject it from your Mac and connect to Windows machine.ġ1. If you’re ready click the partition button.ġ0. It will warn you that you’ll lose all your data. Now select the second partition, name it “WIN DRIVE” (or any other name you want) and change the format to “FAT32”.ĩ. For the first partition select the “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” format.ħ. Name the first partition as “Mac Drive” or any other name just to identify it easily. Now you can adjust the sizes of both partitions either by manually entering it in the “Size” box or by dragging the separator up and down.Ħ.

(We have selected two for this tutorial.)ĥ. Now select the number of partitions according to your needs from the “Partition Layout” dropdown menu. Select the partition tab as shown above.Ĥ. Once the Disk Utility window appears, select your external hard drive from the left pane.ģ. How to partition an external drive to use separately with Windows and MacĢ. It’s called ExFAT, but again when it comes to larger data NTFS beats both FAT32 and exFAT. There’s yet another format that is fully supported by both Mac and Windows. If you want maximum performance without size limitations then go for NTFS. However FAT32 has an edge over NTFS as well, which is you can read/write both from Windows and Mac into a partition with this format. Now you might be thinking why not FAT32? Yes, you can format Windows partition in FAT32 too but it has some limitations like file size cannot be larger than 4GB. It will allow you to use your drive with both Windows and Mac with maximum performance. We will guide you through the whole process of partitioning your external drive to HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) and NTFS formats. If that’s the case then you have come to the right place. So you have got an external drive and want to partition it to keep Mac and Windows data separately.
