Formatting external hard disks

What is the best way to reformat an external hard drive from MS-DOS to MacOS?
My disk utility software (macOS 10.5.8) refuses to delete and reformat a new toshiba hd (STOR.E ALU 2, 1 TB).

Drive Preparation
1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder.
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID then click on the OK button. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.
4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.
5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Security button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.
6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.
Steps 4-6 are optional but should be used on a drive that has never been formatted before, if the format type is not Mac OS Extended, if the partition scheme has been changed, or if a different operating system (not OS X) has been installed on the drive.

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NTFS formatted external hard disks?

does mountain lion supports writing on NTFS formatted external hard disks?

I'm getting immense slow-downs using Tuxera NTFS (latest release as of August 2012). I moved my home folder to an NTFS shared drive. Reading/writing to the cache while browsing in Safari is slow. Takes about 30 seconds for Finder to open my NTFS drive, takes about 1 minute to open an app and close the app. If I disable Tuxera NTFS and make my drive read-only, everything goes back to snappy performance (except for write-errors, since disabling Tuxera means I can't write to my home folder).
What shocks me the most is that if you visit the Tuxera community forum on their corporate website, none of their support representatives have helped their customers since the release of Tuxera NTFS for OS X Mountain Lion. It's as if the company realized they messed up, so they went silent.
I'm about to try the latest version of Paragon. I had it for OS X Lion, but it corrupted my entire drive after 2 months of use, which is why I tried to give Tuxera a shot. Here's to hoping Paragon has fixed their issues.

Can't write to a Windows formatted external hard disk

I moved the Windows XP formatted external hard disc from the Windows machine to the Imac. I can read files on the hard disc, can write from the external to the Mac, and can work with the files once they are on the Mac. But I cannot write to the external. I lack permission, the error message says.
I talked with Apple via my AppleCare arrangement. They tell me I will have to reformat the disc for the Mac before I can write to it.
The problem with the recommendation is that that disc, 160 gb, is over three-quarters filled with backup files for the home network. I can't afford to lose them.
The puzzle is that the network sharing is uneven. So I'm led to think there is some problem with my setup. From the Mac, I can read and write to two Windows computers and the internal hard disc, the C drive, of the third. When the external hard disc was attached to that third computer, I was never able to see it from the Mac.
None of the Windows machines can see the Mac.
Any suggestions?
John
IMac Intel Core Duo Mac OS X (10.4.6)

When you go over a network, the Mac doesn't have to worry about writing to the destination disk, it just sends the appropriate TCP/IP packets and lets the PC that is serving the disk worry about writing to the disk. When the disk is connected directly, then the Mac has to know all about writing to that file system.
It does seem to me that if Apple could read from the drive, they should be able to write to it, but apparently that was more complicated and they didn't implement it.
As for the windows boxen not being able to see the Mac... have you considered installing Bonjour for Windows onto the PCs? My wife has PCs and I have Macs, but we're all networked together. We were having some networking issues, trying to share printers. So I had her install Bonjour on one of her boxes. Suddenly, all our networking problems went away. She could see my printers, and all my drive shares.
So you might want to think about turning thinga around and serving off of the Mac.
Doc

Finder cannot searching for NTFS formatted external hard disk

MacBookAir,1.8GhZ,Memory 4GB1600 MHz DDR3
osx10.9.3
Finder can show and open the files from the external hard disk but can not searching for the files.

Barney-15E wrote:
Tuxera or paragon will give you write access, but I don't know if that will allow Spotlight to work on those drives.
A brief experiment suggests that Spotlight does not index an NTFS volume driven by Paragon NTFS. I don't have a copy of Tuxera to test.
Sorry, cchaikittiporn. Paragon does not seem to be a solution for your issue.

Time taken to format external hard disk

I have just purchased a 1T external hard drive and now using the erase disk to reformat from FAT-32 to Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
I let this run over night (8 hours), however in the morning it still had not finished. As I thought it may have frozen I went to Finder & force quit the disk utility function. I have now started again after reading other posts, but I' can't seem to find anyway giving me an indication of how long this should take. Any suggestions??
Also, I have not used any of the security options.

Normally a reformat to Mac format takes about a minute, maybe less. Do you have one of the options turned on to "zero all data" or one of the other heavy duty "kill all data" check boxes selected when formatting?
Patrick

Format External Hard Disk

I've bought an external HDD which has not been formatted. I'd like to use it on both Windows and Mac. I know Fat32 format will do the trick but how do I format the harddisk into Fat32?

Hi Leiya Lee
Open Disk Utility,
-Select the external disk in the left panel. make sure you have selected the correct disk.
-Click the Erase tab
-Give the disk a name
-Select the Volume Format type to be FAT 32 ( in your case)
-Click Erase
regards roam

Unable to format external hard disk as mac os extended (journaled)

Have just bought a 750gb Western digital HDD. To be able to use it to store video to use in i movie it needs to be formatted in mac os extended (journal). However when I try to do this in disk utility I get a volume erase error reporting an error on exit. the resulting disk is then unreadable until it is formatted back to MS-Dos (fat) again. Any tips or have I just wasted my money on a disk that is not compatible. On the box it says it is compatible with OSX 10.2.8+?

Try the directions in this article. They are for formatting a drive for Time Machine but will work just fine for your purposes.

How do i burn idvd projects in a dvd format to an external hard disk

I have an iDVD project but it is too big to burn to a dvd (11GB!) so I was wondering if I can save the proejct like a dvd onto my External Hard Disk. This is really urgent and important for a school project.
Thanks in advance.

iDVD does not care about file size (it compresses a movie file by about 4:1 o the standard mpeg2 format), only about length.
A standard DVD will hold up to 120 minutes of video, but this includes titles, transitions etc.
iDVD encoding settings:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=iDVD/7.0/en/11417.html
Short version:
Best Performance is for videos of up to 60 minutes
Best Quality is for videos of up to 120 minutes
Professional Quality is also for up to 120 minutes but even higher quality (and takes much longer)
That was for single-layer DVDs. Double these numbers for dual-layer DVDs.
Professional Quality: The Professional Quality option uses advanced two-pass technology to encode your video (The first pass determines which parts of the movie can be given greater compresson without quality loss and which parts can’t. The second pass then encodes those different parts accordingly) , resulting in the best quality of video possible on your burned DVD. You can select this option regardless of your project’s duration (up to 2 hours of video for a single-layer disc and 4 hours for a double-layer disc). Because Professional Quality encoding is time-consuming (requiring about twice as much time to encode a project as the High Quality option, for example) choose it only if you are not concerned about the time taken.
In both cases the maximum length includes titles, transitions and effects etc. Allow about 15 minutes for these.
You can use the amount of video in your project as a rough determination of which method to choose. If your project has an hour or less of video (for a single-layer disc), choose Best Performance. If it has between 1 and 2 hours of video (for a single-layer disc), choose High Quality. If you want the best possible encoding quality for projects that are up to 2 hours (for a single-layer disc), choose Professional Quality. This option takes about twice as long as the High Quality option, so select it only if time is not an issue for you.
Use the Capacity meter in the Project Info window (choose Project > Project Info) to determine how many minutes of video your project contains.
NOTE: With the Best Performance setting, you can turn background encoding off by choosing Advanced > “Encode in Background.” The checkmark is removed to show it’s no longer selected. Turning off background encoding can help performance if your system seems sluggish.
And whilst checking these settings in iDVD Preferences, make sure that the settings for NTSC/PAL and DV/DV Widescreen are also what you want.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1502?viewlocale=en_US

How to format an external hard disk Mac Os Extended (Journaled)?

hello
I connect an external hard disk (2.5' IDE Western Digital Scorpio Blue, WD2500BEVE) via USB or FireWire to my Mac mini. The Disk Utility tool shows an external disk drive of 128 GB - but the disk has 250 GB. How can I format the external USB/Firewire-harddisk 250 GB "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)"?
I tried also to format the disk on a Windows PC (Windows XP). But I could not find a software to format "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)".
Any hints on this? Thanks in advance for any feedback!

andreasmarx wrote:
As I use theses hard disks in a external hard disk case, I'm asking me whether my hard disk cases do not support more that 128 GB disk capacity. Is that realistic?
It is not only realistic but probably the reason your Mac cannot see more than 128 GB of the capacity of the drives mounted in them. It has nothing to do with the interface between the Mac & case (like Firewire) but instead with the controller in the case that connects the raw ATA drive to that interface. Older ATA standards used a 28 bit LBA (logical block address) scheme to access the disk. For 512 bytes per sector this works out to a maximum of 128 GB of addressable disk capacity. The ATA-6 standard, also called Ultra-ATA/100 or just ATA-100, increased the bits in the address space from 28 to 48, with a disk capacity limit of 2 petabytes.
ATA-6 was introduced in 2001, so any external drive case made before then for ATA drives will be forever limited to 128 G. Even now, some come with a controller that does not support the ATA-6 standard, & essentially none have all the hardware to support its full 48 bits of address capacity. However, since 2 PB (2000 terabyte) drives won't be available anytime soon, all you really need is a case that is ATA-6 or better compliant & supports enough address bits for the largest drive you intend ever to put in it.
Case makers don't usually make this information easily available but many now include a "bullet" spec about the maximum capacity their case supports, typically rounded off to simple numbers like 320 GB, 500 GB, or whatever. If you can't find this info, you can assume that the newer the case the more likely it is to support larger capacity drives, or just buy one with a good return policy & test it yourself with the largest raw drive you own.

Help reg what formats to be used for my new 4tb mini stack to back up my macbook and 2 external hard disks

Hey Guys,
I need an advice from you experts regarding the different formats to be used to format my New 4 Tb ministack from OWC. I have a Mid 2010 Intel macbook pro with 500gb hard disk using Mountain lion and two external hard disk from Samsung and Iomega 1Tb each. I want to format this ministack into 4 partitions each of 1Tb each.
1) 1 Tb for time machine to back up my macbook pro.
2) 1 Tb of Free space to be used to store extra data using both windows and mac os.
3) 1 Tb for Samsung back up
4) 1 Tb for my Iomega back up
I know that for 1st option i need to format the partition (volume) to Mac os extended (journalled). I need help for others.For the 1 Tb free space, can i use NTFS so that i can use it on my wifes windows laptop and use a third a party application like tuxera NTFS for use on my macbook which i am already using to use my samsung and Iomega Ext HDD.
Also What format is required for these two 1 Tb volumes dedicated for external hard disk backups and how can i back up my external hard disks to these formatted volumes. Do i need to format them to Mac os extended (journalled) as well as i shall be using macbook pro to back up these hard disks.
Which would be the best software to back up these Ext hdd,can i use time machine? or CCC ?
Your help help shall be gretaly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.

Get Disk Warrior that will repair the problems without requiring that you reformat the drive - $99.00 on a bootable CD. Will not work on a FAT formatted drive.
You will need to use Drag and Drop to save your files by copying them from the bad drive to a good one.
To reprep the drive:
Drive Preparation
1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder.
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID then click on the OK button. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.
4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.
5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Security button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.
6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.

Which external hard disk format (fat32 or ntfs) is compatible with macbook pro ?

Hi . I just bought a macbook pro (13.3 inches) . As the internal storage is not much , i am thinking if buying an external hard disk . Please guide which format of external hard disk (fat32 or ntfs) is compatible with my mac.
Thanks .

Paul-nz wrote:
Ouch! Bad day? .
One other option you might want to consider is exFat.
Its supported on Mac and Windows, and even my TV!
Its got very large file (128PB) and volume size support.
Cheers.
Not again.
The OP wants this to use with a PS3, which does not support exFat. So that suggestion (while quite correct on its face) won't work.
Maybe this will help you.
Check what the File System type is. Do this by going to Start, Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Computer Management, Disk Manager. Select the external drive and read the "File System" type. The file system type must be FAT32 in order for the PlayStation to recognize it.
Split larger, high quality files into smaller files, if necessary. FAT32 has a limit of 3.9 Gigabytes per file, which means some high quality HD movies might have to be split into smaller files, and that makes it less than ideal for some HD content.
2 for 2

I would like to format the external hard disk. I would like to use it in Mac as well as in Windows. What format should I do, connect to Macbook Pro? MS-DOS (FAT) or ExFAT ?

I would like to format the external hard disk. I need to use it in Mac as well as in Windows. What format should I do, connect to Macbook Pro? MS-DOS (FAT) or ExFAT ?

success1975 wrote:
Thanks
1) In 'ExFAT' format, is there a limitation on the file size?
Not one that will matter.
2) Is 'MAC OS Extended' format, only for MAC computers?
Yes, only for Mac
3) What are those (a) journaled (b) Encrypted & (c) Case-sensitive? or when to use those?
Again, only for Mac.

Want to use a Lacie External Hard Disk with Windows and Mac? Can I?...

Hi, I've just purchased a Lacie Extreme D2 external hard disk, I'm looking to use it to move film clips from my Mac G5 to my Sony Vaio laptop. I'll connect the Mac using Firewire 1 and the PC using USB 1.
I understand there is an issue with setting the compaitibility of the hard disk to either Mac or Windows format but I'm wondering if I can set it to both, so it's possible to transfer these files? The hard disk is Windows and Mac compatible but does it have to be partitioned a certain way?
Any help is much appreciated.
Thanks,
Alex

Format the drive as FAT or use the Mac format (HFS Extended) and install MacDrive on the PC.

HT201269 I am trying to save memory on my iPhone 4S/ ios6. Can I back up all photos to icloud and the external hard disk I normally use for photos? If I then delete photos from the iPhone do the get deleted on iCloud?

I am trying to save memory on my iPhone 4S/ ios6.
1) Can I back up all photos to icloud and the external hard disk I normally use for photos? If I then delete photos from the iPhone do the get deleted on iCloud?
2) Can I back up the newsstand to iCloud and save memory on the iPhone?
3) Can I back up the bookshelf to icloud and save memory on the iPhone?

1. What format is the external drive? It sounds like it's ina format that Macs can't write to. Is it a NAS or NTFS?
2. Easiest thing: just move your iPhoto Library to the external
Make sure the drive is formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
1. Quit iPhoto
2. Copy the iPhoto Library from your Pictures Folder to the External Disk.
3. Hold down the option (or alt) key while launching iPhoto. From the resulting menu select 'Choose Library' and navigate to the new location. From that point on this will be the default location of your library.
4. Test the library and when you're sure all is well, trash the one on your internal HD to free up space.
Regards
TD

Imposible continue the installation of Snow leopard 10.6 on a 1TB external hard disk, what can I do?

Imposible continue with the installation of Snow leopard 10.6 on a 1TB external hard disk. I did the same last year and I continued working but suddenly appeared the simbol with a folder and a question mark and I know this is a problem so I click in the format option to the hard disk and when I tried to install again Snow Leopard, 'cause I want to recover my backups with Time Machine, I couldn't continue because the installation didn't respond to the click in the Utilities option or to next step > continue . Please, What can I do? I'll wait for your answers. Thank you so much in advance.

Hello Melophage,
It is the original hard drive which should have been erased by the previous owner. The problem is, I cannot access it without any OS installed. Or maybe there is a bootable USB or DVD that can do it ?
Just an indication: when I boot without CD inserted in it, it shows a grey folder icon with a questionmark like this one:
Thank you for your help
PS: Yes, I am interested by the replacement pair of grey installation DVDs for my model. Where can I purchase this ?

Formatting external hard disks

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