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external hard drive problem...Help Please

drater

drater

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 6, 2005
715
0
The bowels of CT
I just recently bought an external hard drive (portable 2.5" hard disk drive--this is what it says on top of the drive). A friend of mine has one and I plugged theirs in and it worked just fine (they had theirs for a while) but when I plug this one in it shows up as "New Volume" (understandable). But I can't put anything on it...anyone know what I should do?
 
khisayruou said:
Yea, if nothing is on there that is important, just format it.
Click to expand...
in an effort to sound like my member name spelled backwards, how the frig do i do that? hahaha. no seriously, i have no idea.
 
OK

Go into applications folder, then Utilities, there is a program called Disk Utility there. Once you are inside the program select the drive on the left hand side(make sure it is the right one) Click on the lowest level of the drive. then in the tab "erase" choose the format "mac OS extended(journaled)" unless you want it to be read by windows then there is a option for that, i can't remeber what it is called, something like FAT32. Anyways then name of volume, click erase and it should be ready. This will destroy all data on the drive so make certain there is non on it.:)
EDIT: we started our post at the same time iphil......
 
trainguy77 said:
OK

Go into applications folder, then Utilities, there is a program called Disk Utility there. Once you are inside the program select the drive on the left hand side(make sure it is the right one) Click on the lowest level of the drive. then in the tab "erase" choose the format "mac OS extended(journaled)" unless you want it to be read by windows then there is a option for that, i can't remeber what it is called, something like FAT32. Anyways then name of volume, click erase and it should be ready. This will destroy all data on the drive so make certain there is non on it.:)
EDIT: we started our post at the same time iphil......
Click to expand...
there is no FAT32 or anything like that so it can work with both windows and osx. would it be ms-dos?
 
You may also want to consider these ramifications...

trainguy77 said:
OK

...unless you want it to be read by windows then there is a option for that, i can't remeber what it is called, something like FAT32....
Click to expand...

That's correct. HFS+ is only recognizable by OS X, a PC won't even mount it. FAT32 however works with either mac or PC, both can read/write to that format. I just got done setting up my external HD, and I thought I'd mention something I ran into in case it was a concern for you:

If you want the ability to boot from this drive (for troubleshooting purposes, etc) it must be formatted in HFS+. The downside to that is, you can't use it on a PC. But if booting from it isn't as important as the ability to plug it into a PC, you want it formatted in FAT32 (it's called MSDOS something or other in DiskUtility). Just know that if it's formatted to FAT32, you WILL NOT be able to boot from it in OSX, but it will work fine for storage.

I had this dilemma, since I wanted both features (without additional software) and eventually had to decide which was more important. I eventually chose to format it for OSX, since I wanted a bootable drive.

Just some stuff to think trough before you get that fancy new HD loaded full of stuff and it's too late.
 
drater said:
there is no FAT32 or anything like that so it can work with both windows and osx. would it be ms-dos?
Click to expand...

Yes, the MSDOS is FAT32. Once you format it, it will show up as FAT32, so I'm not quite sure why diskutility doesn't just call it that beforehand, but yea, it's FAT32
 
jmort said:
Yes, the MSDOS is FAT32. Once you format it, it will show up as FAT32, so I'm not quite sure why diskutility doesn't just call it that beforehand, but yea, it's FAT32
Click to expand...
Ok, i went into disk utility. Clicked on the external hard drive icon (the lower one) clicked the erase tab, then I clicked "ms-dos file system" and clicked erase....this right? seems like its working, just don't want to transfer a ton of stuff then find out it doesn't work, i just want it as storage, not to boot from.
 
Please note, FAT32 has a limitation of max size 4GB per file. So if you have any files larger than that.. it's not going to be copied to your external drive.
 
yellow said:
Please note, FAT32 has a limitation of max size 4GB per file. So if you have any files larger than that.. it's not going to be copied to your external drive.
Click to expand...
ok...so using the other version "mac os extended journal" should get anysize that i want?
 
From Apple's Support site:

The theoretical maximum file size for a Mac OS Extended file system is millions of terabytes. In practice, the maximum file size is equivalent to the maximum volume size, except for a small amount of disk space reserved for file system information.
Click to expand...

drater said:
ok...so using the other version "mac os extended journal" should get anysize that i want?
Click to expand...

Please note, I'm not talking about how big the hard drive can be formatted, I'm talking about how large a single file can be. Of say.. a movie file of some sort. 4GB max in FAT32.
 
yellow said:
From Apple's Support site:





Please note, I'm not talking about how big the hard drive can be formatted, I'm talking about how large a single file can be. Of say.. a movie file of some sort. 4GB max in FAT32.
Click to expand...
Oh, i understand that. I just want it to work with mac/windows(kill me). just mostly for music and movies. nothing larger than 4gb should be fine. Does the steps that I wrote above seem right?
 
Yeah.. select the drive, click the erase tab, select the format, click the erase button. When it mounts, it'd done. Pretty simple.
 
yellow said:
Yeah.. select the drive, click the erase tab, select the format, click the erase button. When it mounts, it'd done. Pretty simple.
Click to expand...
thanks for all your help guys, if it doesn't work i can always blame you all, and not myself for being completely retarded...hahahaha, thanks.
 
drater said:
Oh, i understand that. I just want it to work with mac/windows(kill me). just mostly for music and movies. nothing larger than 4gb should be fine. Does the steps that I wrote above seem right?
Click to expand...

Yep, You're doing great. MS-Dos File System is in fact FAT32, which is exactly what you want for a (non-bootable) cross-platform drive. My external HD came pre-formatted in FAT32, and it mounted on my PC as easily as my mac and works as good as any internal drive.
 
it's a pretty quick process also, so don't be worried if your whole drive is done formatting in a minute or less (that's how long it took my drive) Note the picture I've included: when you select your newly formatted drive (the child drive, not the parent. that is the drive to which you assigned a name), it should show the drive format in the lower left corner of the window, where you can see my hard drive shows up as Mac os journaled.

Enjoy your new Gigabytes!
 

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yellow said:
BTW, our bill is in the mail. You should be getting it in 5-10 business days.
Click to expand...
Oh yeah, forgot about that...I owe you three lollypops, two twizlers, 8 charleston chews and 18.75 rasianets
 
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