I want to use seagate external hard drive on my mac but it says "Windows NT File System (NTFS)"

[amhomewithmac]

I accidentally plugged my Seagate external hard drive into my PC and now I can only "read" on my Mac, which is where I want to use the Seagate. How do I change the format back?

 

[copper12]

plug it into a pc
right click on in
chose format
chose FAT32
plug it into mac

try it. hope it works
dont forget to backup the data

 

[glamdringfh]

Do you have any data on the external drive you need to keep?

If not, go to Applications --> Utilities --> Disk Management

From there you should see your hard drive in the left hand pane, select it and choose to 'erase' the drive. It will remove your current data and re-format the drive so that OSX can use it again.

**Don't ever format a drive until you've backed up any data you want to keep from it**

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Welcome to Tom's Hardware, amhomewithmac!

Well, if you plan to use it on both systems in the future, you should reformat it in exFAT or FAT32. However, this has some limitations on the size of the files that can be transferred to/from the external HDD. Here you can read more about these limits: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=nGHwMF

When you plug the drive back into your Mac, you can simply backup the data from it and go to Disk Utility. There you should be able to find the Repair Disk command (under First Aid). Give that one a try.
If this doesn't work, you should re-format it. But make sure you have your data copied elsewhere beforehand.

Good luck! Hope this helps.
SuperSoph_WD