You have a Mac-formatted external hard drive that you want to use with your Windows computer. Since Windows recognizes the drive, the issue is likely that the drive is not showing up in File Explorer. You can try formatting the drive to exFat or fat32, which are compatible with both Mac and Windows, to resolve the issue.
Formatting a Mac hard drive to work with Windows involves ensuring the drive is compatible with both Macs and Windows PCs, as most external hard drives are designed to be cross-compatible. However, the Windows system only supports the NTFS file system, making it necessary to format the drive to NTFS for seamless integration with Windows PCs.
Choose a reliable tool like Qiling Disk Master, an all-in-one partition manager that can quickly and safely format a hard drive to multiple file systems. This is recommended over using File Explorer, which may not recognize the target partition and can make the format process dangerous.
Note: This operation will delete the data on your hard drive, think twice, and back up your valuable data to an external hard drive.
Step 1. Launch Qiling Disk Master, locate the hard drive, and select the "Format" option.
Step 2. The hard drive's partition label can be assigned as "C". The file system can be set to NTFS.
Step 3. To format your external hard drive for use with Windows, click the "Proceed" button to start the formatting process. This will erase all data on the drive, so ensure you've backed up any important files beforehand.
After formatting the hard drive to NTFS, you may want to partition this drive. Qiling Disk Master's "Create" feature can help with that.