How to Format Toshiba Hard-Drive for Mac with Parallels?

Hi Sandy,

What you want to do is quite easy. You do not want to format the drive though for Mac. The best partition scheme for a drive that will be used for both Mac and Windows is to format it exFAT, and its actually easier to do it in Windows than on the Mac side.

In Windows just right click on the drive and select Format. When the formatting window shows up under File System click on the pulldown menu and select exFAT, and then put a check next to Quick Format, label the drive, and then click on Start.

If you want to do this on the Mac side... you would have to use Disk Utilit which is located in your Applications -> Utilities folder.

In Disk Utility, on the left side will be a list of the drives, select the Toshiba Canivo and then on the right side of the window there will be a few tabs. Click onthe tab labeled Erase. Then under Format you would select exFAT, label the drive and then click on Erase

It would be easier, using Parallels, just to format the drive for "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)". You can see it both in the Windows/Parallels and the Mac side. Leaving it formatted as NTFS is not going to allow you to access (write to) the drive unless you use third-party software. Formatting it for Mac lets you use it, as I said, on both the Parallels VM and the Mac side.

If you were using Boot Camp, I would advise leaving it formatted as NTFS and purchasing NTFS for Mac to access the drive on both OS's. You can mitigate that by formatting the drive for Mac:

Good luck,

Clinton

Sandy,

exFAT is both Mac and Windows Friendly so that you can use the external in either if you ever needed to plug it directly into a windows machine.

Once the exFAT partition is created then you would do what Clinton suggested. mount the drive on your Mac and then share the drive with Parallels. This way it is usable on both at the same time.

Although you'll always see that dialog box when plugging in a USB drive, if you select "Mac" you'll still be able to read and write to the drive from Parallels/Windows - so I always click "Mac" if I'm plugging in a drive, flash drive, etc.

Where that attribute comes in handy, however, is when plugging in, for example, a headset with phones and a mic, etc.

As you can see from my screen shot below, from Windows 7 Pro running under Parallels, ALL of the drives that I have plugged in are shown in Windows Explorer. And I can grab files from them and write files to them.

Sweet!

Clinton

The bottom of this page.

Clinton

I don't see where that's any special preference... I've pretty much left everything (save memory and VRAM) at the defaults. You may want to contact Parallels or the Parallels forum to see if there' any special preference that you need to see ALL drives, cloud services, etc.

Clinton

I just searched the Parallels Knowledgebase and couldn't find anything when I searched "show mac drives' so it doesn't seem to be an issue? Contact Parallels support directly and ask... because I couldn't find anything like this when I searched the forums, either.

Sorry,

Clinton

I have the same problem as Sandy-Wood, but in El Capitan. However, every time I try to unmount, partition, or do anything else suggested by the many posts--including this set--that address the issue, I end up with an error message: "Operation failed... Unmounting disk. MediaKit reports not enough space on device for requested operation. Operation failed..."

Not enough space? This is a new Toshiba 5 TB hard drive.

I have tried it on the Windows 10 side of Parallels for Mac, and I am told that I need "permission" to access the drive--a drive that comes fresh out of the box.

Parallels and Mac both are just one problem after another, never with a solution.