You’ll probably want to uninstall Java when you’re done.Įrase the Mac Partitions, Including the EFI System Partition HFSExplorer unfortunately requires you install Java to use it, but it’s the only free option here. If you only have Windows systems available, you can use HFSExplorer to copy files from the drive onto your Windows system drive or another drive. If you have a Mac lying around, you can plug the drive into a Mac and back up the files. Instead, we’ll just be wiping the drive and starting over from scratch. This process won’t actually convert the file system. Click Erase and now you can get to whatever you want for a format.First, back up the data on the Mac-formatted drive if you have anything important on it. So all you need to do is switch to Show All Devices. Now you can actually change it to whatever you want. Or probably what you want to do is select the Device and the result might be the same. But if you move up the chain you see that you can change the container to be something else.

If you go into Erase it you can only erase it as an APFS. Now when you have have the Volume selected, the volume is APFS. Now with APFS you've got Device, Container, and then Volumes under that. So before we had, say, a physical device for the drive and then you had volumes. Now you can see that I'm actually selecting the Thumb Drive Volume inside of the one container for this actual physical device.

One where it shows only the volumes and another that Shows All Devices. You see in Mac OS Mojave disk utility has two view modes. But, in fact, it's a completely different problem and a very simple one to solve. If I click Erase here you see that the only format options I get are APFS. But if you need to reformat it, say as the older Mac format or maybe a cross platform format with Windows, it seems like once you format something like this thumb drive at APFS you can't reformat it as anything else. How do you reformat a drive that is formatted APFS? APFS is the current way to format Mac drives. Video Transcript: Here's a question that's been asked a lot recently all over the internet. Check out How To Reformat An APFS Drive As Something Else at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.

How to reformat hard drive from dos