If you wish to boot the drive on a PC, or to use it with older versions of Windows, you may also need to set the partition scheme to Master Boot Record (MBR) for full Windows compatibility. Making the Drive Bootable & Compatible with Older Windows PC using MBR The result is still the same however when it comes to formatting the drive. Note this approach to formatting a drive for Mac and Windows PC compatibility are the same on basically every version of MacOS and Mac OS X, but the screenshots may look slightly different depending on your OS version. Remember, formatting a drive erases all data on it. That’s how you can make a drive compatible with both Mac and PC.

Click the “Erase” button to format the drive for Mac & Windows PC compatibility.

Click the pulldown menu alongside “Format” and select “MS-DOS (FAT)”.

Click the drive name on the left side list in Disk Utility, and then click the “Erase” tab.

Connect the drive you wish to format for dual compatibility to the Mac.

Launch Disk Utility, found within /Applications/Utilities/.

This works with any hard drive, flash drive, SSD, USB drive, or just about any other storage type that is accepted by both a Mac and Windows machine, and the entire process is performed in Mac OS X: How to Format a Drive for Mac & Windows PC Compatibility Let’s quickly review how to format any drive for Mac and Windows PC compatibility with read and write support.

Remember, formatting a drive erases all data contained on it so back up important files before proceeding. It only takes a few minutes to start and it’s extremely easy, and we’ll walk you through the entire process of formatting drives for Mac and PC compatibility in a few simple steps. Though this excellent cross-platform compatible ability is unknown to many users, it’s not a complex process, and if you frequently use both a Mac and Windows PC you will find this particularly useful because any data, media, or files stored on the the drive will always be accessible from any operating system.

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