You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

Level 2

162 points

How to "initialize" an external USB hard disk?

I erased an external HD.

Now when I want to use it, it cannot be mounted, alert tells me it is not initialized.

How do I do that??

(In both Catalina and Ventura?

MacBook Pro

Posted on Feb 4, 2023 11:21 AM

Top-ranking reply

Level 7

24,041 points

Posted on Feb 4, 2023 1:31 PM

You'll use Disk Utility to initialize an external drive, aka erase, format and partition.

FInd Disk Utility in Applications > Utilities folder.

For Catalina and newer macOS use, use the APFS format and GUID partition map.

View in context

Similar questions