Why you may need to reformat the hard drive on your Mac If you’re reformatting a USB stick or portable hard drive, you may want to use APFS encrypted to protect your data if the drive is lost or stolen. If you’re using it as your Mac’s main drive, APFS is the best choice as it has replaced Mac OS Extended as Apple’s preferred file system for macOS. When you reformat a drive, you can choose which file system to use.

For Macs, that file system can be HFS+ (Mac OS Extended Journaled) or APFS (Apple File System).

creating a new file system that can be read from and written to by the operating system of the computer you’re using.

checking for bad sectors and other errors.

wiping the disk (or, in reality, destroying the file structure so that no references to the files remain - the files themselves still exist until they are overwritten).

There are several steps to the process involving: In the simplest terms, reformatting a disk means wiping it clean of data and preparing it for use again, whereas formatting a disk just describes the first time it is prepared for use. Whatever your reason for reformatting your Mac, we’ll show you how to do it here. A more likely scenario is that you want to reformat an external drive or USB stick, perhaps one you bought or were given and that was formatted for PC. But, occasionally, if your boot drive has become irreparably corrupt, it may be the only option.

It’s a pretty drastic step that should only be contemplated in desperate circumstances. Most of us will never need to reformat our Macintosh. But to help you do it all by yourself, we’ve gathered our best ideas and solutions below.įeatures described in this article refer to the MacPaw site version of CleanMyMac X. So here’s a tip for you: Download CleanMyMac to quickly solve some of the issues mentioned in this article.

Reformat thumb drive for mac and pc