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exFAt on Mac OS X 10.6.8

I heard somewhere that if a External Hard Drive is formated exFat on a Mac, it wont work on Windows, unless it is Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) or 10.8 (Mountain Lion). I have Snow Leopard (10.6.8) and I wanted to know if I format my External HD for exFat will it work on Windows? I currently have is formatted as Fat32 but there is a 4GB limit so I wanted to try exFat.

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Jan 26, 2013 12:06 PM

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Posted on Jan 26, 2013 12:11 PM

exFAT works on Windows (XP, Vista, 7 and 8) and OS X (10.6.5 and newer), so it should work without any problem. If you format it on OS X, a Windows PC should be able to write on it without any problem.


Note that, before erasing the external disk, you have to copy the files onto the internal disk, so you won't lose the files

17 replies

Oct 17, 2015 9:07 AM in response to Oviyafrom北京

That would appear to be the one. Though you can sort of see the problem. disk0s1 is the EFI partition that is at the top of each GUID partitioned drive. The next is your Macintosh HD partition. There should only be one more for the ABC drive, but it sees two. No idea what that 620 MB drive is, but it shouldn't be there.


Figures that the Salvage feature is off in the demo, but as long as the bottom feature is available and it also sees the partition, you can try and see what it can find. It will only allow you to recover a handful of files in demo mode, but will at least tell you if it will find anything at all.

Sep 15, 2016 8:11 PM in response to macjsus

Ran into this for first time. 128gb flash drive came format for fat32. Needed it to hold >4gb files. Also needed it to mirror a directory that had many thousands of small files. Original directory size of 57gb turned into 80gb on the flash drive as smallest file was 128K when copied. Found issue is with cluster size. Default block size in diskutil for exfat is 512b with cluster size of 512x256=131,072b or 128k. Used newfs_exfat to build customer filesystem using cluster size of 2. Make sure you use the correct disk device if you use this command. newfs_exfat -c 2 disk2 you can use -N to see what the settings will be without making changes. newfs_exfat -N -c 2 disk2 .

exFAt on Mac OS X 10.6.8

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