how to format my hard drive on macbook air

How to format my hard drive on macbook air how to#
How to format my hard drive on macbook air mac os#
How to format my hard drive on macbook air Pc#
How to format my hard drive on macbook air mac#

Do this until there are no errors or (like me) you receive a message saying that the disc couldn't be repaired. Click the Repair Disk button that will only appear after you click Verify. Click the Verify Disk button in the Disk Utilities.Select your drive on the left navigation panel (It's probably already selected).After you've selected a language preference, Select the Disk Utility item in the list of utilities.Continue holding the keys until the Recovery Utility prompts you to select a language (Grey Screen) **NOTE:**You may have to hold the keys for up to two minutes. Hold down the Command+R keys as you start the device.Just in case you pull off the rubber coating, you'll need a case removal tool like you use to replace a cell phone screen.Recommend: A cold beer and a lot of patience.New Hard drive that is compatible with Mac.

How to format my hard drive on macbook air mac#

Mac running OSX Lion or later (prior versions didn't have the recovery partition).

I've had little to no success with USB powered devices. Be sure to get one with external power source.

SATA/IDE to USB Adapter (Mine was Vantec USB 2.0, but it shouldn't matter.

Finally, on startup one day, he saw a progress bar that would complete and then the device would shut down. Initial Symptom: My husband's Mac had been randomly shutting down for some time, but we were limping it along. If your Mac is unable to access that feature, this may not work for you, but I included some other handy stuff, like recovering files from the drive. NOTE: This process only worked because the hard drive was still able to access recovery mode by holding Command+R on startup.

Please use Common sense if I did this and look around the screen for something that looks like what I'm talking about. I did most of this from memory, so I may have messed up a label here or there.

How to format my hard drive on macbook air Pc#

This is probably overkill on instructions, but there are PC people out there who may try to help out the (much more) rare critical Mac issue. Hopefully I diagnosed a bad hard drive correctly (I'll provide my method) and I hope this helps someone out there.

How to format my hard drive on macbook air how to#

WARNING:Formatting the drive will erase all data on the drive, so you should copy any data you want off the drive prior to formatting.Being a 1 Mac household and an IT professional who has only supported PCs, I had a challenging time trying to figure out how to reload OSX after my husband's Mac hard drive died. If APFS is not available then the drive is in MBR and not GUID Partition Map. NOTE: Make sure that Scheme is set to GUID Partition Map and not Master Boot Record (MBR).

Check step 2 to confirm Disk Utility is Showing All Devices NOTE: If you don’t see Scheme, then make sure that all devices are showing and the non-indented entry is selected.

Select the non-indented entry, you will see Media in the nameĬlick the button labelled Erase in the menu which will bring up this window.

Click View in the upper left and select Show All Devices.

To open Disk Utility - Open Finder > Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility IMPORTANT: Reformatting the drive will erase all data on the drive, so you should copy any data you want off the drive prior to formatting.

Click here to see other formatting options for your operating system.

Looking for a different formatting option? If you need to go between macOS and Windows then format your drive ExFAT on macOS

APFS does not natively work with Windows.

How to format my hard drive on macbook air mac os#

APFS formatted external drives are not compatible with Time Machine on macOS versions High Sierra to Catalina. Time Machine requires the external drive to be formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled) for these versions.

APFS is only available when Scheme is set to ‘GUID Partition Map’, APFS will not be shown when Scheme is set to Master Boot Record – See Step 6.

APFS is not officially supported for macOS versions prior to 10.13 (High Sierra), and will not mount on 10.12 and earlier.

It is important to keep the following in mind when formatting to APFS:

Not seeing your version of macOS? Click here to see other versions of macOS and different formatting options.

Not sure which version you are using? Click here to determine your version of macOS.

IMPORTANT: This article applies to the following macOS versions: