How to Format an OS X Terminal Hard Disk. Mac OS X Mountain Lion gives users several ways to access the Terminal and three common options for formatting a hard drive.

If you need a USB drive that's widely compatible with different devices, you may want to format it to FAT32. Here's how to do so on Mac and PC.

Formatting a drive in macOS is easy, and is all done via Disk Utility. Handily, both Windows and macOS play nice with exFAT, with each reading from and writing to partitions using the file system.

While the Mac can use a hard drive formatted for Windows, some features may be limited. So it's a good idea to format a new hard drive specifically for macOS.

In Knowledge Base article #107285, Apple notes that Mac OS 9 disk drivers are required after reformatting a disk.

It appears that, under Mac OS X 10.5.6, Disk Utility seems to have a few quirks, namely a glitch in which it does not properly format some drives. Many users have attached both external and ...