The Apple Support Community will permanently close on November 20, 2026. Starting today, the site will no longer accept new posts and is available in a read-only state.
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The Apple Support Community will permanently close on November 20, 2026. Starting today, the site will no longer accept new posts and is available in a read-only state.
You can continue to find trusted guidance and support on the official Apple Support site.
We want to thank the community members who have contributed their time and expertise to help others with their Apple products.
I Just bought a MacBook Air and have an external hard drive with pictures from my old pc on it. Is there a way to format the hard drive so that I can now copy pictures from my Mac to the hard drive without erasing the hard drive? I have pictures on the hard drive that are not anywhere else.
MacBook Air, iOS 10.2
Formatting the drive will erase its contents. While software such as Paragon NTFS can be used to write to the drive without reformatting it, the photos should be on at least two drives; all drives will eventually fail.
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The only way out is to copy the photos off, reformat the drive, then put everything back. And please have another copy of those photos somewhere before formatting the drive!
Formatting external hard drive
