How to format an drive to use with a Mac & PC. If you want to format a drive so that you can copy files between a Mac and a PC you'll want to follow the tutorial above, but choose ExFAT from the. Disk Utility is the software on your Mac that will format your external hard drive for Mac and PC. You can find Disk Utility by clicking on the Application folder. Looking to share an external hard drive between a Mac and PC? The best way to do it is with a drive formatted as FAT32. Though this format has some limitations, it enjoys nearly universal support. Need to format an external hard drive for Mac and Windows. Windows PC and Mac use different filesystems. The Windows uses NTFS and Mac uses HFS. They are incompatible with each other. So, if you want to use an external hard drive on both Windows and Mac, you need to format it to a filesystem that is compatible with Windows PC and Mac.