You will be prompted to enter the password.

To mount it, just double click on the disk image from your external hard drive. Once the encrypted disk image has been created, the next step is to mount it on Mac as a virtual disk. So even if you create a disk image of the same size as your external hard disk, the actual size of the disk image will correspond to the size of the data stored in it. As you mount the disk from the image and save files into it, the image size will automatically increase to contain the files. This is the advantage of sparse bundle disk image. You’ll notice that the size of the actual disk image is much smaller than the assigned size. Finally, click on the Create button to save the disk image on your external drive.This will make the disk image as a dynamically expanding one. Set the image format as sparse bundle disk image.256-bit AES encryption is more secure than 128-bit AES, but also takes longer to decrypt. To protect the disk with password, choose an encryption method.Further, you can give a custom name to the disk that will be mounted from the image, and choose its size and format.This will create the disk image on your external drive. In the popup that appears, provide the name of the image file and select the save location as your external drive.

Click on New Image from the top panel in Disk Utility.Launch Disk Utility from Applications directory.Connect your external hard drive to Mac via USB.The following steps will allow you to create a new password protected disk image on Mac: This will leave the drive accessible on both Windows and Mac computers, but the encrypted disk image can only be mounted on a Mac (with the correct password) to access its contents. Instead, you can create an encrypted disk image and store it on your external drive. If you frequently access your external drive on both Windows and Mac, the above solution might not be convenient for you. Protect data using an encrypted disk image Also, an external hard drive that is fully encrypted in Mac won’t be accessible on a Windows computer at all. This will, of course, erase all existing data on the drive. If it uses the Master Boot Record (MBR) scheme, you might need to reformat the drive and change it to GPT scheme. But in order to do so, the external drive should be using the GUID Partition Table (GPT) scheme.

One option is to fully encrypt the external drive and lock it with password. Encrypt external hard drive on Macįortunately, Mac OS X provides a few native solutions to help you protect your data on external hard drives. If your hard disk manufacturer does not provide a password protection software compatible for Macs, you need to explore the alternative methods mentioned below.

Mount mac external drive on pc