Lucien updated on 2021/5/14 to Mac Data Recovery
Summary: How to format and use an external drive on Mac? If you format a wrong external drive by mistake, is it possible to get back the lost data? The best unformat software Donemax Data Recovery for Mac can help you easily unformat the drive and recover lost data from the drive.
If you get a brand new external hard drive and want to use it on Mac, you have to format it first. Also, if there are issues with the external hard drive like the drive is inaccessible, partition gets lost, etc., you can format the external drive to reuse it.
After formatting a used drive, the data on the drive will be all removed. Then you cannot view and access the files directly in Finder on Mac. If you don't reuse it and add new data to the formatted drive, you can still unformat external hard drive on Mac and recover the lost files with unformat software.
If you want to format/wipe the data permanently and make sure the wiped data unrecoverable on the external hard drive, you can erase the external drive and wipe the data permanently with a professional data erasure tool.
How to format an external hard drive on Mac? The Mac operating system provides the built-in application Disk Utility that can help you format an external hard drive directly. You can do as follows to format an external hard drive with Disk Utility.
First, please connect your external hard drive to your Mac computer. Then run Disk Utility from Applications > Utilities. You can also click Go from the top taskbar and choose Utilities and then select Disk Utility.
Disk Utility will show the connected drives, including your external hard drive. Please choose the external hard drive from the left panel and click Erase button to continue.
In the popup window, you can assign a new name and file system for the external hard drive. You can format it as HFS/HFS+, APFS, exFAT, FAT32, or others as you want. At last, please click the Erase button to continue. It will format your external drive with the assigned settings.
After formatting a new external hard drive, you can then access the drive directly on Mac and use it to store data. However, if you format an external hard drive by mistake, the files will be lost. If you have important files on the drive, you need professional and reliable unformat software to retrieve the lost files.
To unformat an external hard drive and recover data effectively, we suggest you try the best external hard drive unformat software – Donemax Data Recovery for Mac. The software can quickly unformat the drive and recover the lost files successfully with the original folder structures.
The software can easily recover lost data from the formatted external hard drive. No matter you lost pictures, video clips, audio files, documents, emails, or other files, you can download and use the software to help you recover the files easily.
How to recover data from the formatted external hard drive? Please do as follows to recover the lost files step by step with the unformat software.
Step 1. Connect the external hard drive to your Mac and run the unformat software. Choose the formatted external hard drive from the device list.
Step 2. Click the Scan button and the software will search for files and rebuild the folder structures of the lost files.
Step 3. After the scan is done, you can see all the found files directly. Please check and choose the wanted files to recover to another drive.
What's more, the software work well to recover lost data in other data loss cases, such as deleting files, partition loss, file system crash, and so on.
As you can see, if you format an external hard drive on Mac, you can easily recover the format data. However, you want to format and wipe all the data permanently in some cases. If you want to sell an old external hard drive, remove privacy information, or wipe sensitive data from the drive, we suggest you use Donemax Data Eraser for Mac to wipe the data permanently.
To wipe the data permanently from an external drive, you can use the Erase Hard Drive option of the software. Please first connect the external hard drive to the Mac. Then choose the option to wipe the external hard drive. It will wipe all the data permanently and no data recovery software could recover the lost data.
Lucien
Contributing Writer
Lucien is a writer and a chief programmer of Donemax software who has worked in the company for 5+ years. He has written much of the content on the site and devotes to providing troubleshooting and solution for Windows and Mac users including disk cloning, data recovery, migration, eraser, error fixes.
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