Just follow this easy step-by-step guide and you’re all set. In this post, I’m going to show you how to format your external drive for a Mac compatible file system i.e. If the company's latest smartwatch is on your wrist, we want to read your review. Possibly the best solution to using a hard drive with both Windows and Mac without the use of third-party software is creating two partitions on the drive, one for Windows and one for Mac. I am trying to access a PC formatted external hard drive, however when I attempt to mount it I get a message saying the drive is not recongnized and if I want ti initialize, which i believe if I execute will remove the files I am trying access.Is there a way to access the files on the external hard is a avi file i need to edit. Apple Mac machines support a different file system. That’s all because it’s been initialized with Windows NT File System (NTFS), which is primarily for PCs. But somehow, macOS doesn’t allow you to write data to the drive. So, you just bought an external hard drive or a portable SSD and wanted to use it on your Mac. Backup Entire Computer To External Hard Drive.For Backing Up Parallels To An External Hard Drive, Should It Be Formatted For Mac Or Pc 3,5/5 6360 votes