- When you attach a storage disk to a Mac with the purpose of erasing or repartitioning it, you'll be presented with the option of selecting one of the three available partition maps: GUID Partition Map, Master Boot Record, and Apple Partition Map.In this article we will explain what a partition scheme is and which one to pick when formatting a drive.
- Mac OS Extended. Choose one of the following Mac OS Extended file system formats for compatibility with Mac computers using macOS 10.12 or earlier. Mac OS Extended (Journaled): Uses the Mac format (Journaled HFS Plus) to protect the integrity of the hierarchical file system.
Launch Disk Utility. Either head to Applications Utilities, or tap Command + Space and start. To format an external hard drive for Mac with Time Machine, you must follow the steps below. Step 1 Open Finder, Applications, then go to Utilities and Disk Utility. Step 2 Follow the steps above to format the drive, and then you can use it with Time Machine on your Mac system. Part 3: Bonus Tip – Data Recovery from Formatted Hard Drive on Mac.
Sep 27,2020 • Filed to: Hard Drive Recovery • Proven solutions
'How to format an external hard drive Mac? What format system to use when reformatting my storage drive for a Mac?'
This is a frequent question asked by first-time, as well as the not-so-tech-savvy, macOS users. Learning how to format an external hard drive Mac is essential. Because saving all your data on the Cloud is nice and all, but physical storage is still popular. Especially if you don't have a stable internet connection or if most of your files are large.
What Is The Disk Format For Mac Os
Luckily, you don't have to learn rocket science to be able to format an external hard drive for Mac or PC. The operation is pretty straightforward. When it comes to your iOS device, we have listed two methods for you, read below and explore more.
Part 1: What Is the Best Format for External Hard Drive Mac?
The first step to formatting your external drive for a Mac computer is choosing the right format. There are four possible choices:
- APFS (Apple File System)
- HFS+ (Mac OS Extended)
- exFAT (Extended File Allocation Table)
- FAT (MS-DOS)
To understand which is the best for you, let's have a comprehensive overview of each of them.
1. Apple File System
The APFS was first introduced in 2017 as a replacement for the HFS+. Nowadays, all new Macs come with the operating system preinstalled on APFS, as this system is optimized for use with SSD and flash storage drives. However, it still works with traditional HDD drives too.
This is the best format to pick if you have an external SSD or USB flash drive that you don't intend to use with a Windows device.
The biggest strength of this system is the speed, as well as the encryption and metadata handling. However, you won't be able to use this system with Time Machine.
2. Mac OS Extended
The HFS+, or Hierarchical File System plus on its real name, was the main file system used for Mac until 2017.
This type of file system is suitable to use with both HDD and SDD drives, but the latter will perform slightly better with the APFS mentioned above. If you have an older Mac, though, choosing the HFS+ is your best bet.
In general, all external drives formatted to HFS+ work nicely with older Mac versions but are incompatible with Windows.
3. Extended File Allocation Table
Designed by Microsoft, the exFAT is a good choice if you plan to use the external hard drive with both macOS and Windows systems. Yet, you won't get top performance on either. This choice is more appropriate for USB flash drives, although you can still use it for SDD and HDD units too.
The main issue with exFAT is that your drive will be more prone to fragmentation when used with Apple devices and is less stable than NTFS on Windows. If you really have to share the drive between Mac and Windows machines, that's your best option though.
4. MS-DOS
Macs also support FAT32 drives, marked as FAT in Disk Utility. This format should be avoided at all costs unless you're dealing with a really old Windows computer, which you really have to use in parallel with your Mac system.
Typically, there is no reason to choose this option unless you're planning to use the external hard drive on a Windows XP or earlier machine.
Part 2: How to Format an External Hard Drive Mac?
Now that you know which format to choose, it's time to learn how to format an external hard drive for Mac. There are essentially two methods, with Disk Utility or Time Machine function.
Note: If you plan to format an older external drive, perhaps one you used with another device, make sure to backup all data before proceeding. Formatting is a permanent procedure that can't be reversed. While there are data recovery software you can use if you lost data, it is always better to prevent.
What Is The Disk Format For Macbook Air
That said, here's how to format an external hard drive Mac:
Method 1: Format Mac Hard Drive with Disk Utility
Disk Utility is a utility application proprietary to macOS that is used to both format and manage internal and external disks. Here's how to use it:
Step 1 Connect the external hard drive you want to format to your Mac, then start the Disk Utility app that you can find under Applications -> Utilities.
Step 2 On the left side of the Utilities screen, find the name of the external hard drive you want to format and select it. Then, on the top side under the Disk Utility, click on the Erase button.
Step 3 Follow the on-screen prompts to select the desired file system and allow the drive to format. That's it! After the process is complete, you can either start using the drive or choose to create partitions on it.
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Method 2: Format Mac Hard Drive with Time Machine
Formatting an external hard drive with Time Machine is as easy as formatting it with Disk Utility. Time Machine, however, gives you the possibility to create an automatic backup of the data on your hard drive before formatting it.
Before you proceed, therefore, you should first set up the external drive to use with Time Machine. To do this, open System Preferences and select Time Machine after you've connected the external drive to your Mac.
Now, click on Select Disk and select the desired drive from the list. Click on the Use Disk button. At this point, the system will run an automatic backup two minutes after you've clicked on the Use Disk button, or you can proceed with the formatting if the hard disk is empty.
To format an external hard drive for Mac with Time Machine, you must follow the steps below.
Step 1 Open Finder, Applications, then go to Utilities and Disk Utility.
Step 2 Follow the steps above to format the drive, and then you can use it with Time Machine on your Mac system.
Part 3: Bonus Tip – Data Recovery from Formatted Hard Drive on Mac
Sometimes, it may happen that you accidentally formatted an external hard drive containing important data. Whether it's your wedding pictures or your bachelor's degree thesis, chances are you want to get that data back as quickly as possible.
If you have a newer version of Mac, you can use the Apple Time Machine to recover your canceled files, or you could choose to use external software, such as Recoverit Data Recovery.
1. Recover Data with Apple Time Machine
In the former hypothesis, you can try to recover your data with the Time Machine. This app is Apple's backup feature present on the newer systems. If you followed the steps above before formatting the hard drive with Time Machine and allowed the app to execute the backup, then there are high chances that you can recover any lost data without too much hassle.
To do so, just launch the Time Machine and browse through the folders to see if it has saved the files you require.
For easier browsing, you can use the time stamp feature on the right side of the screen and select the date or time when you executed the backup. Once you found the files, simply click on Restore to get them back.
2. Recover Data with Recoverit Data Recovery
If you didn't use the Time Machine function or couldn't find the files you need, you can try to recover any lost files with trusted third-party software, such as Recoverit - Data Recovery.
Recoverit (IS)
A Life Saver to Solve Your Data Loss Problems!
- It allows you to recover unlimited lost or deleted files from your Mac device, including photo, video, and audio data, document files, and more.
- It supports all types of Mac files irrespective of their extension.
- Compatible with both internal and external drives, USB pens, memory cards, and other hardware, so you can rest assured it will retrieve your data if it's there.
- Retrieve data from accidentally deleted files, lost or formatted partitions, data lost due to virus attacks, system crashes, or data lost by the Time Machine.
- It is free to download and supports all leading macOS versions, including the 10.14 release.
3,165,867 people have downloaded it
This system is also very easy to use, in just three easy steps:
Step 1Install the application and choose the desired location
Download and install the software on your Mac computer, then open it and select the external hard drive, partition, or location where you want to retrieve data.
Step 2Start the scan to retrieve your lost data
Click the Start button. The software will now scan the selected drive and display all retrieved data in an easy-to-scour list.
Step 3 Preview the recovered files and save them in your chosen location
Review and select the target files, then launch the recovery process. That's it. The software will restore your lost data.
Conclusion
As you can see, how to format an external hard drive Mac is not particularly complicated. The Disk Utility allows you to format the desired drive to the desired system in a blink of an eye. Backing up the data on your drive with Time Machine also allows you to avoid the recovery hassle. If you still lost some data, you even know which software to use to recover all lost files.
Now it's your turn. Use this guide to format your unreadable external drive, download, and use the data recovery software if needed, and don't forget to share this article with your Mac-addicted friends. They might make good use of it too.
The icon depicts an internal hard drive within a generic file icon. | |
Filename extension | |
---|---|
Internet media type | application/x-apple-diskimage |
Uniform Type Identifier (UTI) | com.apple.disk-image |
Developed by | Apple Inc. |
Type of format | Disk image |
Apple Disk Image is a disk image format commonly used by the macOS operating system. When opened, an Apple Disk Image is mounted as a volume within the Macintosh Finder.
An Apple Disk Image can be structured according to one of several proprietary disk image formats, including the Universal Disk Image Format (UDIF) from Mac OS X and the New Disk Image Format (NDIF) from Mac OS 9. An Apple disk image file's name usually has '.dmg' as its extension.
Features[edit]
Apple Disk Image files are published with a MIME type of application/x-apple-diskimage.
Different file systems can be contained inside these disk images, and there is also support for creating hybrid optical media images that contain multiple file systems.[1] Some of the file systems supported include Hierarchical File System (HFS), HFS Plus, File Allocation Table (FAT), ISO9660 and Universal Disk Format (UDF).[1][2]
Apple Disk Images can be created using utilities bundled with Mac OS X, specifically Disk Copy in Mac OS X v10.2 and earlier and Disk Utility in Mac OS X v10.3 and later. These utilities can also use Apple disk image files as images for burning CDs and DVDs. Disk image files may also be managed via the command line interface using the hdiutil utility.[3]
In Mac OS X v10.2.3, Apple introduced Compressed Disk Images[4] and Internet-Enabled Disk Images for use with the Apple utility Disk Copy, which was later integrated into Disk Utility in 10.3. The Disk Copy application had the ability to display a multilingual software license agreement before mounting a disk image. The image will not be mounted unless the user indicates agreement with the license.[5]
An Apple Disk Image allows secure password protection as well as file compression, and hence serves both security and file distribution functions; such a disk image is most commonly used to distribute software over the Internet.
History[edit]
Apple originally created its disk image formats because the resource fork used by Mac applications could not easily be transferred over mixed networks such as those that make up the Internet. Even as the use of resource forks declined with Mac OS X, disk images remained the standard software distribution format. Disk images allow the distributor to control the Finder's presentation of the window, which is commonly used to instruct the user to copy the application to the correct folder.
A previous version of the format, intended only for floppy disk images, is usually referred to as 'Disk Copy 4.2' format, after the version of the Disk Copy utility that was used to handle these images.[1] A similar format that supported compression of floppy disk images is called DART.[1][6]
New Disk Image Format (NDIF) was the previous default disk image format in Mac OS 9,[1] and disk images with this format generally have a .img (not to be confused with raw .img disk image files) or .smi file extension. Files with the .smi extension are actually applications that mount an embedded disk image, thus a 'Self Mounting Image', intended only for Mac OS 9 and earlier.[7][2]
Universal Disk Image Format (UDIF) is the native disk image format for Mac OS X. Disk images in this format typically have a .dmg extension.[1]
File format[edit]
Apple has not released any documentation on the format, but attempts to reverse engineer parts of the format have been successful. The encrypted layer was reverse engineered in an implementation called VileFault (a spoonerism of FileVault).[8]
Apple disk image files are essentially raw disk images (i.e. contain block data) with some added metadata, optionally with one or two layers applied that provide compression and encryption. In hdiutil, these layers are called CUDIFEncoding and CEncryptedEncoding.[1]
UDIF supports ADC (an old proprietary compression format by Apple), zlib, bzip2 (as of Mac OS X v10.4), and LZFSE (as of Mac OS X v10.11)[9] compression internally.
Metadata[edit]
The UDIF metadata is found at the end of the disk image following the data. This trailer can be described using the following C structure.[10] All values are big-endian (PowerPC byte ordering)
The XML plist contains a
blkx
(blocks) key, with information about how the preceding data fork is allocated. The main data is stored in a base64 block, using tables identified by the magic 'mish'
. This 'mish'
structure contains a table about blocks of data and the position and lengths of each 'chunk' (usually only one chunk, but compression will create more).[10] The data and resource fork information is probably inherited from NDIF.Encryption[edit]
Format Disk Windows 10
The encryption layer comes in two versions. Version 1 has a trailer at the end of the file, while version 2 (default since OS X 10.5) puts it at the beginning. Whether the encryption is a layer outside of or inside of the
blkx
metadata (UDIF) is unclear from reverse engineered documentation, but judging from the vfcrack
demonstration it's probably outside.[8]Utilities[edit]
There are few options available to extract files or mount the proprietary Apple Disk Image format. Some cross-platform conversion utilities are:
- dmg2img was originally written in Perl; however, the Perl version is no longer maintained, and the project was rewritten in C. It extracts the raw disk image from a DMG, without handling the file system inside. UDIF ADC-compressed images (UDCO) have been supported since version 1.5.[11]
- DMGEXtractor is written in Java with GUI, and it supports more advanced features of dmg including AES-128 encrypted images but not UDCO images.[12]
- The Sleuth Kit. Handles the DMG format, HFS+, and APFS.
Most dmg files are unencrypted. Because the dmg metadata is found in the end, a program not understanding dmg files can nevertheless read it as if it was a normal disk image, as long as there is support for the file system inside. Tools with this sort of capacity include:
- Cross-platform: 7-zip (HFS/HFS+), PeaZip (HFS/HFS+).
- Windows: UltraISO, IsoBuster, MacDrive (HFS/HFS+).[13]
- Unix-like: cdrecord and
mount
(e.g.mount -o loop,ro -t hfsplus imagefile.dmg /mnt/mountpoint
).[14][15]
Tools with specific dmg support include:
File browser for mac. It’s just easier to carry a laptop as well.
Or explore to discover mansions, villages, and fortresses and enter different dimensions. ConsA few unruly server communities: Joining a server community is a good way to learn about the game and participate in projects and events you could never take on alone.
And you can change the characteristics of your game through community-created mods: Add a map to track your travels, for example, or introduce new items and crafting recipes.Create useful mechanisms: Using, you can build automated devices, from lamps, passcode doors, and automated farms to Rube Goldberg machinery. Redstone acts a bit like an electrical circuit, letting you power items on and off to build surprisingly sophisticated devices.Engaged community: The game is supported by a large and passionate community, running, and You can find everything from detailed explanations for building redstone devices to live streams of players running around bashing mobs. Or fight mobs - including zombies, skeletons, and dragons - and even other players.Single or multiplayer: You can create a single-player world to play alone, set up a world that you and others can play on a local network, or join a world (or create your own) hosted on a server, with dozens to hundreds of players.Customize the game: When you start a new world, you pick your style of play, including Survival mode (where you collect resources, craft items, and work to stay alive) and Creative mode (where you can quickly spawn items, fly around, and spend your time building).
- Windows:
- Transmac can handle both UDIF dmgs and sparsebundles, as well as HFS/HFS+ and APFS. It is unknown whether it handles encryption.[16] It can be used to create bootable macOS installers under Windows.[17]
- A free Apple DMG Disk Image Viewer also exists, but it is unknown how much what it actually supports.[18]
- Unix-like:
- darling-dmg is a FUSE module enabling easy DMG file mounting on Linux. It supports UDIF and HFS/HFS+.[19]
See also[edit]
References[edit]
Disk Format For Mac And Pc
- ^ abcdefg'hdiutil(1) Mac OS X Manual Page'. Archived from the original on 2016-05-14. Retrieved 2016-05-14.
- ^ ab'Mac OS X: Using Disk Copy disk image files'. Archived from the original on 2013-12-19. Retrieved 2013-04-25.
- ^
hdiutil(1)
– Darwin and macOS General Commands Manual - ^'Re: Some apps refuse to launch in 10.2.8! (OT, but very important)'. Archived from the original on 2014-01-17.
- ^'Guides'. Apple. Archived from the original on 2009-03-06. Retrieved 2010-10-27.
- ^'DART 1.5.3: Version Change History'. Archived from the original on 2013-12-19. Retrieved 2013-04-25.
- ^'Software Downloads: Formats and Common Error Messages'. Archived from the original on 2010-12-24. Retrieved 2009-05-06.
- ^ ab'VileFault'. 2006-12-29. Archived from the original on 2007-01-09. Retrieved 2010-10-27.
- ^Michael Tsai (2015-10-07). 'LZFSE Disk Images in El Capitan'. Archived from the original on 2017-04-09. Retrieved 2017-04-09.
- ^ ab'Demystifying the DMG File Format'. Archived from the original on 2013-03-17.
- ^'dmg2img'. Archived from the original on 29 November 2010. Retrieved 2010-10-27.
- ^'DMGExtractor'. Archived from the original on 2011-01-02. Retrieved 2011-01-03.
- ^MacDrive Features / Boot Camp / System Requirements /. 'MacDrive Home page'. Mediafour. Archived from the original on 4 October 2010. Retrieved 2010-10-27.
- ^'How To Convert DMG To ISO in Windows, Linux & Mac'. Archived from the original on 2010-03-07.
- ^'Convert DMG To ISO using PowerISO'. Archived from the original on 2009-05-02. Retrieved 2009-02-15.
- ^'About TransMac for Windows'. www.acutesystems.com.
- ^'Convert'. www.winytips.com. winytips. Retrieved 5 May 2020.
- ^Olivia Dehaviland (2015-03-03). 'Apple DMG Disk Image Viewer'. DataForensics.org. Archived from the original on 2015-04-02. Retrieved 2015-03-10.
- ^'darling-dmg'. darling-dmg. Retrieved 29 March 2015.
External links[edit]
- Apple Developer Connection A Quick Look at PackageMaker and Installer
- O'Reilly Mac DevCenter Tip 16-5. Create a Disk Image from a Directory in the Terminal
Format Disk Mac Terminal
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