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Hard Drive Formatting

I hope someone can answer me quickly as I'm struggling. A long time ago, I bought a Western Digital external Hard Drive to store my iPhone's Photos on. I struggled to format it so it would work on my MacBook but after a bunch of posts here and questions, I ended up formatting it to APFS. Linked is the whole proccess of the thread where I struggled to format it just in case it helps whoever helps me. I formatted it and I put my photos on there. Now recently, I purchased a PC with windows on it and I would like to move my photos there. When I plugged in my Hard Drive into my PC, it didn't recognize the hard drive and the hard drive didn't pop up in file manager. Does anyone have an idea on how I can format my external hard drive from APFS to NFTS without losing any data. It's extremely important that I don't lose the pictures as they are from about 7 years ago and they are pretty important. After some digging the words that kept popping up were creating a partition or something like that and then formatting but I don't really understand it.

Posted on Jun 12, 2023 2:44 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jun 12, 2023 8:24 AM

Sorry, but the reformatting process will erase all of the data on the drive.


One suggestion, is to obtain a second drive. Connect it to your MacBook and format it as ExFAT using the Disk Utility. This format is readable from both Macs and Windows PCs. Then copy the photos from the APFS drive to it.


You then should be able to access these photos from your PC.


Ref:



Similar questions

2 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jun 12, 2023 8:24 AM in response to MacBoooooooook

Sorry, but the reformatting process will erase all of the data on the drive.


One suggestion, is to obtain a second drive. Connect it to your MacBook and format it as ExFAT using the Disk Utility. This format is readable from both Macs and Windows PCs. Then copy the photos from the APFS drive to it.


You then should be able to access these photos from your PC.


Ref:



Hard Drive Formatting

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