If you lost data on your hard drive after formatting, we can attempt to recover it and get it back.ĭisk Drill is a third-party data recovery software solution that will enable us to do just that. How to Recover Data Lost After Formatting You can also choose to use Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled) but I wouldn’t recommend that you do that unless you plan to work with many files that need to be case-sensitive. You will then be given a choice of format options.You can enable this by clicking on your View options and choosing Show All Devices. Ensure that you choose the entire device when formatting. Now, within Disk Utility select the hard drive that you would like to format to Mac OS Extended.Select it from the list of results and then the app will launch. The Spotlight search window will then appear, and you will want to type in “Disk Utility”. We can launch the app by pressing the keys COMMAND + SPACE BAR. Method 2: How to Format APFS Hard Drive to Mac OS Extended by Using Disk Utilityĭisk Utility comes installed on your Mac as part of macOS and it offers a graphical interface for formatting our hard drive to Mac OS Extended. If you prefer a more graphical solution, let’s look at how we can use Disk Utility to change APFS to Mac OS Extended. Once you’re sure that you have everything entered correctly, click return on your keyboard.In the screenshot below I outlined in blue where you can look for this information. Find the number associated with yours and put it into the Terminal command. dev/disk1 is the number that the Terminal assigned to the hard drive. ExternalDrive is the name that I gave the hard drive. This will show us a list of the hard drives that are internally in our Mac and externally connected as well.ĭiskutil eraseDisk HFS+ ExternalDrive /dev/disk1ĭiskutil eraseDisk is the command that will format the hard drive.

Once in the Terminal, type in the command diskutil list and then click on the return button.We can do this by going to Finder > Applications Folder > Utilities > Terminal. The Terminal comes installed as part of macOS and it’s a free tool that we can use to execute system commands such as converting from AFPS to HFS+. Method 1: How to Format a Hard Drive to Mac OS Extended by Using the Terminal Please keep in mind that formatting your storage device will delete any data that is currently on it.

Mac sierra how to format usb drive