MacBook Pro :: Formatting External Hard Drive - Format Using Extended Or Free Space?
Jul 27, 2010
I just got my new Seagate 640gb external hard drive and am in the process of formatting it on my MBP. However, I am not sure which format to do? My main use for the hard drive is for transferring media files back and forth between my MBP and PC using just one partition on the drive. I already know I'm not supposed to pick 'Mac OS Extended (Journaled)' because I believe that is to use it as a boot drive. So should I pick 'Mac OS Extended' or maybe 'Free Space'?
got a real basic question to ask and you're gonna think im an idiot for asking...I just bought a 320gb western digital elements hard drive and want to reformat it so that its compatible for both mac and pc's. i intend to format it as NTFS-3G as it would allow me to use it on the 2 platforms without having the 4GB file size restriction that fat32 has, anyway.....
when I go to reformat my external hard drive in disk utility, I see my external hard drive to the left, and there's a "sub" hard drive as a child of the external hd listed uppermost. just wandering which one of the two do i select before going to Erase>Windows NT filesystem (NTFS-3G)>erase? Do I select the uppermost drive and erase that or the lower one? or both
I bought a WD My Book Essential to do Time Machine backups. It is formatted for a PC but I was told I need to format for my IMac before I can use it. How do I do that? Is it a complicated process? I have only been using a Mac for about a year now and am still learning about them.
I have an external hard drive that I was previously using on PC, having attempted to use it on a Mac, it will not write to it. I've found that I have to format to FAT32, which I think i can just about manage (yes, im a girl) but my concern is, if i format through the MAC, will i then lose what's on the hard disk as the tab says 'erase'? I have a lot of images on the hard disk so am a little petrified! Any advice for this really basic question would be appreciated!
I have a hard drive that had 2 ntfs partitions. I deleted one of the ntfs partitions in windows so now half the drive is free space but disk utility wont touch it without formatting the other partition. is there a 3rd party osx app i can use to turn this into a usable hfs+ drive?
I have a 1TB external LaCie hard drive. Presently, it is loaded with about 300GBs of space so I should have around 650GBs left. However, it is only showing about 240GBs left. I think the problem is that I used to use this hard drive for Time Machine backups, I deleted them via the recycle bin. I checked the recycle bin, nothing there. I verified the disk, everything ok, I repaired it as well. I even erased the empty space.
I have a Western Digital Elements 1TB External USB drive and am unable to format 1 partition as Mac OS Extended (or Journaled for that matter) in Disk Utility. I can format the drive as FAT32 with no issue, and I can format the drive as FAT32 with 1 NTFS partition with no issue. But any time I try to format the partition as Mac OS Extended or Mac OS Extended Journaled it reports an underlying error and stops. I can't figure it out. I don't know what the problem is or what to look for. Does anyone have any pointers?
I only have like 8 gb left on my macbook's hard drive. Are there any programs I can run that will defrag/free up space? How much does Apple Store typically charge to upgrade a hard drive? How easy is it to do myself?
I just bought a new external hard drive and backed-up my computer onto it. Then today I realized that I didn't format the drive. All I did was follow instruction for hooking it up. Also, I'm a Mac user. Is it customary to do a full and proper format of newly purchased external hard drives? The most I did was verify the disk in disk utility when I first plugged in the HD to my computer. Is that enough?
I am a long time PC user that just recently got a MacBook Pro. I am out of space on my hard drive and not sure exactly what is eating up all the volume? I went to About This Mac and looked at the Macintosh HD and it says I only have 28GB out of 499GB available. The piece that is using up lion's share is all yellow "Other". How do I find out what is causing this? Is there an easy way to determine what file is chewing up my hard drive?
My MBP has an 80 gig internal hard drive that has approx. 1 gb free. The only media I have on the computer is approx. 40 gigs of music, all of my photos are on an external drive. How can I free up space without moving my music to an external drive?
I backed up my hard drive to an external drive. I now want to free up my hard drive storage space. How do I do that. I deleted several GB of iTunes but the free file space did not increase. How can I free up disk space?
I've been having problems with 3 Maxtor 500GB 400/800/USB FW drives. They will randomly unmount themselves -- forcing me to turn them off, wait a minute, then turn them back on. There doesn't seem to be any pattern to when they unmount themselves. All three drives had been formatted using Mac OS Extended (Journaled), and I'm on the most recent version of Leopard.
Thinking I had 3 lemons, I called Seagate (who purchased Maxtor) for tech assistance. The tech guy told me that external drives should not be formatted using Journaled, only Mac OS Extended.
I just bout this Western Digital External Hard drive, Passport SE. Anyways, I formatted it to MS-DOS (FAT) so I can use on mac and/or windows. One of the other main reasons I bought it was so I could use it to watch videos on my Xbox 360.
Now I've seen tutorials online with windows how to re-format it to FAT32 so it works properly on xbox 360 but cannot figure it out on mac? On some of the tutorials they use certain programs to do it, is there something like that for mac I can download? Is fat32 and fat the same? I know there has to be a way for me to be able to format it to FAT32 using mac.
Not sure, but for some reason my mac hard drive has got to be 95% full. I know where all the things I put on my laptop are and have added them up and they do not equal up to 132 GB of space. I have deleted the Previous Systems folder which was taking up a lot of space. Where are there more mysterious locations that are taking up space that are not needed and safe to delete?
I just recently realized that my Seagate external HD is under Mac OS extended (journaled) and not Mac OS extended. I only want to use this device for storage/backup and don't want to run anything off of it. Is there any non-destructive way to change it to just extended? If not, what are some of my alternatives?
Ive recently purchased a new external hard drive. I plan to use it on both Apple and Windows OS.Â
I was told that if I do, then i could corrupt the files/data that I will be accessing on both computers.Â
Is there a "universal" format for an external drive which would prevent/avoid this kind of thing happening ? How should i format it or which format should i use so that i can use the drive both OS ?
Info: MacBook Pro (13-inch Late 2011), Mac OS X (10.7)
I have a 750GB internal HD but film a lot of movies. To free up space, I have moved my iMovie clips off to a secondary hard drive, but I have not seen my free disk space free up on my Macbook pro. Why is this? I moved, not copied the files. They only show now on the external hard drive. I am looking at the free space in Finder > Get Info. I have easily moved a few hundred GB off to the new drive, but my internal HD still shows as over 500Gb used.Â
I am trying to format a clickfree external hard drive, but disk utility cannot do it. I even tried one partition, but it doesn't work either. It was formerly used on Vista or XP (unsure). It includes a virtual cdrom partition that is about 300MB. No matter what I do (format or partition), I cannot get this drive clean. I want to make it an external drive for time machine backups. Is there any way I can get rid of this virtual cdrom, and actually wipe the drive clean, so it will work 100% on a Mac (without this annoying error message that the virtual cdrom drive cannot be read on a Mac - it asks whether I want to ignore or eject). The website is bare with facts/help about this. It says that OS X is supported, but I cannot format the damn drive. Here is a screenshot. I just want to format the entire drive and have one partition (250GB drive) to use for backups: [URL:...] Are there any other tools that will do this job, since Disk Utility cannot?
I'm running Snow Leopard on my new Macbook Pro. I've got a 1.5TB External hard drive that I'm trying to figure out how to format in HFS+ with Apple Partition Map. I can figure out how to format in HFS using Disk Utility, however it still does it in GUID format and I do not know how to do it in Apple Partition Map.
Googleing this for hours has lead with all kinds of information on how to go to GUID FROM Apple Partition Map but not the other way around. I know GUID is the new hottness.. but this drive will be used exclusively to connect to my XBOX 360 and it supposedly only reads HFS+ when its formatted with Apple Partition Map. (I have tried it with Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with GUID, and the XBOX does NOT recognize it) I do not want to use Fat 32, (I know that that is the other major option) beacuse it limits file size.
It seems like I'm always fluctuating between 2 and 9 gb of free space on my hard drive. Every time I need lots of space it seems to disappear, then it reappears in a week. Is this normal? If I'm low is there something I can run to bring this space back?
I have a 500GB external hard drive that is partitioned into 3 sections - [1] Mac OS extended for dedicated time machine backups (200GB), [2] Mac OS extended for general file storage (100GB) and [3] FAT32 for backing up my husband's windows PC (the rest). I've been doing some video editing and moving clips between the external HD and my macbook. But now I've finished I noticed that something weird has happened. The Mac partition of the external HD currently has only 3 files, around 1.2GB. But Finder is showing 77GB is used and therefore not letting me copy my DV footage (around 40GB) that I want to transfer to a friend's computer.
I've put a screenshot here - and have hidden files/folders displayed. So what is taking up the 76GB that finder says is used?
I've tried repairing and verifying disk permissions, verifying the disk, etc, etc, and even defraging the disk. I still can't make a partition in the HD with bootcamp or disk utility.
