I have looked on the support pages about this - most of the issues were raised 7,11,13 years ago. This macbook air is 2 years old. I have a 2tb external drive i want to partition.
i have done all the first aid on it and the macbook air.
any help?
MacBook Air 13″, macOS 12.6
Also It is best to erase the drive on macOS by using Disk Utility if you want use exFAT with both macOS & Windows since Windows may use a file allocation size which macOS may not recognize. When erasing the drive make sure to select the whole physical drive within Disk Utility. Within Disk Utility you may need to click "View" and select "Show All Devices" before the physical drive appears on the left pane of Disk Utility. Erase it as GUID partition and the file system of choice.....exFAT if you want to share the drive with Windows.
Also It is best to erase the drive on macOS by using Disk Utility if you want use exFAT with both macOS & Windows since Windows may use a file allocation size which macOS may not recognize. When erasing the drive make sure to select the whole physical drive within Disk Utility. Within Disk Utility you may need to click "View" and select "Show All Devices" before the physical drive appears on the left pane of Disk Utility. Erase it as GUID partition and the file system of choice.....exFAT if you want to share the drive with Windows.
Is this external drive solid state?
If it is solid state, you'll want to use APFS.
HFS Extended Journalled should be used if intend to connect it to older Macs running Sierra or older systems, and you can only do this on drives without data on them already.
NTFS is for PCs to read/write, and Macfuse NTFS can write to it from a Mac.
Alternatively you can use SMB file sharing to network the Mac to a PC, or software like Anydesk or Teamviewer over the internet.
My advice make the Mac a network file share point with the PC.
Share Mac files with Windows users - Apple Support
That way, you never run into trouble writing files to the drive from the Mac, and the PC can access the files.
Format it HFS Extended GUID.
thanks - that is something i will look into. My purpose to have an external drive for mac and PC is music. I use apple music, mainly on my iphone / Mac. The PC would be to mirror my music for back up reasons, but also to serve as a music "server" in my house.
Mac: obtain music from the interwebs and import to apple music (iTunes)
iPhone: store most of my music for personal music
PC: mirror storage of music and eventual house all the music and connected to speakers (of some type)
So, your suggestion would be all music lives on Mac, but is accessible to PC. I wonder if that would work for music?
It is easier to backup directly on a Mac, any Mac downloaded music, using software such as Carbon Copy Cloner or Superduper.
Meta data does not transfer smartly between platforms.
An Apple Music Sharing account, iTunes for Windows can pickup on music shared through Family Sharing on an AppleID. So if you have music on your Mac, your PC should be able to see it without any necessary reformatting of your hard drive from Mac compatibility.
Thanks. I’m away and will try your suggestions. Appreciate it
stay tuned
yep, that may be part of the problem. ExFAT is also usuable on Mac and PC, but not bootable on Mac. Formatting for both Mac and PC will require erasing the drive.
I reformatted the external drive as ExFat and Guid Partition.
then went to partition, and it is not letting me hit the + sign to add partition(s).
MediaKit reports partition (map) too small. If you recently grew your whole-disk, you should run whole-disk repair. : (-5341)
