How to Dual-Boot Windows and macOS on a Mac

By Melanie Pinola 19 January 2018

Mac vs. Windows. Windows vs. Mac. Why choose when you can get the best of both worlds by dual-booting? Here’s how to install Windows on your Mac using Boot Camp so you can jump back and forth between the two operating systems on the same computer.

What You’ll Need

Before you start, make sure you have enough space on your hard drive for both Windows and Mac. We recommend at least 30GB for each, but the more space you have, the better. You’ll also need a USB flash drive (4GB or larger) and a Windows 10 ISO disk image, which you can download here from Microsoft, and a valid Windows 10 license. Finally, make sure your Mac model can support Windows 10 in Boot Camp—check this list to find out.

Install Windows 10 on Your Mac

In the steps below, we’ll use Boot Camp Assistant to create a bootable USB drive and install Windows 10 on a new partition. Then you’ll be able to choose which OS you want to use whenever you start the Mac up.

1. Download the Windows 10 ISO disk image from Microsoft using this link. Choose the 64-bit version of Windows. Also, some people, including myself, have gotten an error message if the ISO image is saved to your default Downloads folder, so save the ISO image to your Documents folder or somewhere else to avoid problems.

2. Open Boot Camp Assistant. You’ll find this in the Utilities folder or you can hit CMD + Spacebar to search for «Boot Camp Assistant.»

3. Click Continue at the Introduction screen.

4. Click Continue again at the Select Tasks screen.

5. Choose the Windows ISO image and select the destination USB drive. Note that the USB drive will be reformatted, so make sure you have a copy of any of the files on it somewhere else before proceeding.

6. Click Continue and then Continue again. Your Mac will format the USB drive and create the Windows installation media.

7. Click Install to accept the partition size for each OS. By default, Windows will have a 32GB partition, but you could also click the Divide Equally button to divide your Mac’s hard drive space equally between OS X and Windows.

7. Follow the prompts to finish installing Windows. The Mac will need to restart to complete the process and will automatically boot into Windows 10 when it’s done.

Set the Default Startup OS or Toggle Between OS X and Windows

Once you have Windows installed, you can set the default OS that will start each time you boot your Mac. To do this, head to the Startup Disk preference setting in Settings.

Every time the Mac starts, you can also toggle between OS X and Windows by holding down the Option (Alt) key immediately upon startup.

How to Format a Hard Drive For Both Windows and Mac

By Melanie Pinola 29 December 2015

Want to use one external drive for both your Windows PC and your Mac? One hurdle you’ll face is that, by default, these platforms use different filesystems. Windows uses NTFS and Mac OS uses HFS and they’re incompatible with each other. However, you can format the drive to work with both Windows and Mac by using the exFAT filesystem. Here’s how.

In this guide we’re using exFAT instead of FAT32, another filesystem that both Windows and Mac can read and write to, because FAT32 has a maximum 4GB file size limit whereas exFAT can work with files as large as 16EB (exabytes). exFAT also performs better than FAT32.

You can format the drive from either the Mac or the Windows machine. However, if you want to use part of the drive for OS X’s Time Machine backups, you should do this from the Mac, since there’s an extra step to make the drive compatible for Time Machine.

How to Format an External Drive in OS X

1. Connect the drive to the Mac.

2. Open Disk Utility. The easiest way to do that is hit CMD and the spacebar at the same time and type in Disk Utility to find the program.

3. Select the drive you want to format.

4. Click Erase.

If you don’t plan on using the drive for Time Machine, skip steps 5 to 11 below and continue with step 12.

5. Give the drive a descriptive name and leave the default settings: OS X Extended format and GUID partition map. These will format the drive in OS X’s HFS+ filetype so it will be compatible with Time Machine.

6. Click Erase and OS X will format the drive.

7. With the drive selected in Disk Utility, click Partition.

8. Enter the amount of space you want to set aside for Time Machine. In this example, we’re shrinking the Time Machine partition to 128 GB instead of allowing Time Machine to take up the whole drive.

9. Click Apply.

10. Select the new untitled partition so we can format it as exFAT for use with both Mac and Windows.

11. Click Erase.

12. Give the partition a name and select exFAT for the format.

13. Click Erase to finish.

Your exFAT-formatted drive or partition can now be used for both Windows and Mac. Note that using a drive frequently between Windows and Mac could increase the chances of file corruption, so make sure you have backups of the files on the shared drive and be extra careful about safely ejecting the drive before disconnecting it from your computer.

How to Format an External Drive in Windows

The instructions below are for Windows 10, but other versions of Windows from Windows 7 and up can also format an external drive as exFAT for use with Mac as well.

1. Connect the drive to your Windows PC.

2. Open the Disk Management tool. You can do that by typing «disk format» or «disk management» in Windows search or going to Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Create and format hard disk partitions.

3. Right-click on the external drive’s partition or unallocated space you want to format and choose New Simple Volume…

4. Follow the wizard to choose a volume size.

5. Assign a drive letter.

6. Choose exFAT as the file system in the Format Partition screen.

7. Give the volume a new name.

8. Click Next.

9. Click Finish.

Windows will format the drive as exFAT and you’ll be able to use the drive on both Windows and Mac.

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Use Both Windows and a Mac? Use These Tweaks and Work Smarter

If you’re always switching back and forth between platforms, consider making some basic tweaks to your Mac’s setup so that its behavior mirrors that of your Windows PC.

If you switch between a Windows PC and a Mac on a regular basis, some of their most obvious differences are sure to trip you up often and slow down your work.

Today we’ll see how you can fix those by making some basic tweaks to your Mac’s setup so that its behavior mirrors that of your Windows setup. Of course, you can also choose to make Windows more like macOS instead.

Note: If you’re moving from a PC to a Mac completely, we’d recommend learning the Apple way of doing things from the get-go.

Switch to Windows-like Scrolling

Head to System Preferences > Trackpad and under the Scroll & Zoom tab, uncheck the box next to Scroll direction: natural. That takes care of matching up the scrolling style on both your Apple and Microsoft computers.

Maximize Windows with the Zoom Button

The (green) Zoom button in the window controls on a Mac seems to have a mind of its own — it maximizes windows in some apps and resizes them to various fits in others.

If you’d like the Zoom button to always maximize the window i.e. expand it to fill the screen, install Right Zoom (free) and be done with it. To go full screen, use that button in tandem with the shift/control/command key.

When you open Right Zoom for the first time, its settings window pops up, prompting you to configure and activate the app. You have the option to set up a hotkey for the maximize function and enable Right Zoom for select applications.

Quit Apps with the Close Button

Do you often get surprised by an app that’s sitting in the dock even after you clicked on its Close button a while ago? After a year of switching to a Mac, I still do. I guess I’ll always equate Close with closing an app rather than with closing a window, as my Mac wants me to. But hey, there’s an app for users like me (isn’t there always?). It’s called RedQuits — the name says it all.

Love me my macbook but hate the fact that the close don’t close the browser or any app RedQuits SOLVED it. #RedQuits

You can also get used to using the command+q keyboard shortcut to quit an app (whereas command+w closes the window or current tab).

Change Function Key Behavior

The F1, F2, F3. keys on your Mac (and on modern PC keyboards) pull double duty as media keys, volume keys, brightness keys, and so on. To use them as regular function keys like you do on a classic PC keyboard i.e. without holding down the Fn key first, go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard and check the box next to Use all F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys.

Make Finder Search in the Current Folder

When you search for a keyword with a specific folder open, Finder searches your entire hard drive, unlike Windows’ Explorer, which searches only the open folder and its subfolders.

To replicate Explorer’s in-folder search function in Finder, go to Finder > Preferences > Advanced and from the dropdown menu for When performing a search, select Search the Current Folder.

Remap Keys for Convenience

The reversed positions of the Ctrl and Alt equivalents on the Mac and the lack of keys like PgUp, PgDn, PrntScrn, and Backspace might not seem like a big deal when you have switched over to a Mac one hundred percent. Likewise, the lack of Mac-like features won’t matter much if you’re used to Windows now. But if you have to switch between a Mac and PC too often, having to deal with such differences can make you want to scream in frustration.

so weird.. switching from windows to mac to windows, keep pushing the wrong shortcuts on the keyboard pic.twitter.com/9s7El0WPaP

Dual booting Windows on your Mac or getting a common all-in-one keyboard for your Mac and PC can save your sanity some. Another partial solution is to repurpose less-used keys to compensate for the missing or confusing ones on any one device — on your Mac in this case.

All PC keyboards are not built alike. For example, there might be Win and Fn keys sandwiched between Ctrl and Alt or just the Win key, or the numeric keypad might be missing. For maximum convenience, you’ll have to remap Mac keys based on the key placement on your PC keyboard. Install an app like Karabiner to get total control over the remapping.

Skip the app if you just want to disable pesky modifier keys or swap functions between them. You can do that from System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard. There, click on the Modifier Keys. button. This brings up a dialog box where you can, say, turn the ctrl key into the command key, or disable the Caps Lock key.

Map Your Favorite Keyboard Shortcuts

When you keep hitting Enter to open files in Finder umpteen times a day and end up with the filename selected for renaming, you know it’s time to port your favorite keyboard shortcuts from Windows to macOS. Luckily you can replace a shortcut or create a custom one on your Mac.

Head to System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts first. This section is where you’ll find the shortcuts that Apple has already set up for you. For any function that you see listed in this section, you can add a shortcut or replace the existing one. To do so, select the shortcut field and key in the shortcut you’d like to use. Be sure to also select the corresponding checkbox to enable the use of that shortcut.

TIL you can make custom keyboard shortcuts for menu items in arbitrary Mac applications, I’m pretty sure this is going to be a game changer

To create a brand new shortcut, select App Shortcuts from the left panel and click on the «+» icon beneath the right panel. See a new dialog drop down? Great! That’s where you now need to select:

• the application where you’d like the shortcut to work
• the function — exactly as it appears in the application’s menu — for which you’re creating the shortcut, and
• the keyboard shortcut itself

So, which Windows shortcuts would be quite convenient to have on your Mac? These, for starters:

• f2 — for renaming the selected file (Finder)
• f5 — for reloading webpages (Safari or any other browser)
• f11 — for entering full screen mode (All Applications)
• option+f4 — for closing the active window
• option+enter — for getting file info (Finder)
• enter — for opening the selected file (Finder); you’ll need a third-party solution like XtraFinder (free) for this one

Get a Start Menu

Your Mac’s dock is neat feature, but for the sake of matching things up with your PC, you could get rid of the dock and install a taskbar-and-Start-menu combo in its place. The app uBar ($20, free trial) makes that possible. Here’s a snapshot of what will replace your dock:

If you’d like to keep the dock as it is, but want give it some extra power, install Hyperdock. It brings Windows-like previews and window snapping capabilities to your Mac’s dock.

Get Common Apps

Install the macOS versions of your favorite and most used apps from Windows. Can’t find a macOS counterpart for an app? Do the next best thing — look for an app that comes closest to the Windows one in terms of the interface and basic functionality.

Better yet, go platform agnostic and hunt for free web apps. There’s no dearth of those, and you can even turn them into desktop apps with Fluid (free to $4.99).

In this experimental phase, stick to apps that are free or come with a free trial. You don’t want to spend too much money on apps that you’re not even sure you want.

Create a Shared File Repository

Set up your cloud storage app on both your PC and Mac. It’s the easiest way to share files between them. If both devices are on the same network, go for a cross-platform app like Dukto for sharing files.

A Word About App Permissions

Some of the apps listed here need special permissions to work. To grant these permissions, all you have to do is follow the on-screen prompts that appear when you install the apps. If you miss the boat then, you can still go to Security & Privacy > Privacy > Accessibility to give those apps permission to control your Mac. Don’t worry, that’s not as sinister as it sounds.

PC to Mac to PC

These tweaks might seem like a lot of work (and they are), but the impact they’ll have on your workflow is tremendous. Forget productivity, it’s the end of unintentional clicks and keypresses that you’ll appreciate the most. Finally keys and buttons are where you expect them to be and do what you expect them to do!

Do you jump back and forth between Macs and PCs regularly? What drives you crazy when you switch? How do you make it better?

Running out of memory on Android? Here’s how to increase RAM on any Android phone or tablet.

Akshata trained in manual testing, animation, and UX design before focusing on technology and writing. This brought together two of her favorite activities — making sense of systems and simplifying jargon. At MakeUseOf, Akshata writes about making the best of your Apple devices.

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