Format exFAT partition to HFS+

[darkbayinc]

I have a 2 TB external HDD with data on it. I partitioned the drive on Windows with half the drive containing data and is formatted to NTFS. The other drive is formatted to exFAT in Windows because disk utility in OSX does not recognize an NTFS partition. The partition map is Master Boot Record. I openend disk utility in OSX and tried to erase the partition to Mac OSX journaled but i get "Couldn't modify partition map. Operation Failed". I just want to format the empty partition to HFS+ without touching the NTFS partition with data on it. Can anyone help me out.





Thanks

 

[Kissmyne]

Disk Utility cannot "edit" MBR scheme partition maps once created(reformat/erase only). I have tested this with multiple external drives.
If the drives partition scheme is GUID.. this limitation does not exist. You could try Terminal and the Fdisk command... however approach this with extreme caution as it will be very easy to lose data(so goes the story of basically every partition map editing utility)..

Your safest bet is to move all of your data to another drive and reformat the entire disk and recreate the partitions.. if your goal is not flexible..

OS X only "officially" supports reading NTFS volumes..not writing to them.However, there is software such as Paragon NTFS which would allow you to write to NTFS volumes

As an additional side note.. I use Macs and Windows PCs side by side frequently, I typically format ALL of my external drives to ExFAT as both operating system (OS X and Windows) have full read and write support unless you are using Windows XP...