Steps to format Mac hard drive with Disk Utility and Recovery HD

A hard drive file system means ‘how the operating system stores data on the drive’. There are different hard drives formatting used by Mac, Linux, Windows operating systems. In general, there are three common filesystems, which are used i.e: HFS+, NTFS, and FAT32. However, these file systems are not compatible with every operating system. HFS+ is used by Mac OS X, Windows uses NTFS and FAT 32 etc..

Here are some more information about file systems:-

Here, one question is very important “If FAT32 works on both OS, why don’t we use it as default?”

 Answer is FAT32 has some limitations on file size however, it can work with 4GB larger file size but, this filesystem is outdated as compare to growth of computers technology. Since, it is cross operating system compatible so, still widly used by people. Users do format their disk and assigned different filesystem as per work requirements.

How to format Mac disk with Disk Utility?

Step 1: Open Disk Utility from application folder.

Step 2: Choose the mounted drive on the left hand side bar

Step 3: Go to the Erase tab

Step 4: Choose a hard drive format. (Mac OS Extended (Journaled) is HFS+)

Step 5: Click format and your format process starts and it will permanently erase all of the data

Steps to format Mac drive with Recovery HD:-

Step 1: Power off your Mac system

Step 2: If you have FileVault enabled, just press and hold the Command and R keys and power on

Step 3: If you don’t have FileVault enabled, just press and hold the Option key and power on and Use the arrow keys to select Recovery HD.

Step 4: Open Disk Utility from the welcome screen

Step 5: Select the Erase tab

Step 6: Select Mac OS Extended (Journaled) for the file system format and name the drive Macintosh HD

Step 7: Click Erase

Step 8: When the process completed, go back to the home screen of recovery tools and select Install OS X and complete the installation.

These are the different ways to format your Mac drive. Formatting task can also be done by one of the well known third party tool i.e Drive ToolBox. Drive initilizer utility of this tool helps to  Format Mac Drive. It is a complete pack of 12 utilities which can perform all Mac maintenance related task very quickly.