This wikiHow teaches you how to format your computer's built-in hard drive. You cannot format the whole hard drive—doing so would erase your operating system—but you can format a portion of the hard drive after creating a partition. You can format your hard drive on both Windows and Mac computers. 'SSD VS HDD, I want to use SSD as my boot drive since it has a better performance. MiniTool ShadowMaker can easily transfer my HDD to SSD without reinstalling OS.' In addition, if you only want to migrate Windows OS from HDD to SSD, you can ask another hard drive cloning software, MiniTool Partition Wizard, for help.
Boot Macbook Air From Usb Thumb Drive
Plug the bootable installer into a Mac that is connected to the internet and compatible with the version of macOS you're installing. Turn on your Mac and continue to hold the power button until you see the startup options window, which shows your bootable volumes and a gear icon labled Options. Make sure the destination disk is the USB thumb drive you've inserted. It can take about 20 minutes to format and set up the USB installer on the Mac.
For those of us who rarely transfer files physically across devices, file-format capability may be a distant memory. It used to occupy a lot of attention. But it still crops up whenever you’re trying to put files on a USB thumb drive to hand off to someone else. If you’re both Mac users, swell; with Mac and Windows in the mix, you might be tempted to pick FAT32 when formatting that thumb drive.
But FAT32 is distinctly out of date. Designed for an earlier time, it can’t handle files larger than 4GB. Instead, pick ExFAT, its replacement (and still quite old), best used on drives of 32GB or larger capacity.
While first ensuring you have a copy of any data on a drive you want to format as ExFAT, as formatting will erase the drive’s contents, follow these steps:
Attach the drive to your Mac.
Launch Disk Utility (from Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility).
Select the drive in the left-hand sidebar.
Click Erase.
From the Format menu, select ExFAT.
From the Scheme menu, select Master Boot Record.
Click Erase and follow prompts to confirm.
Boot From Usb Drive Mac Os X
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Boot From Thumb Drive Mac
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