Formatting external drive

[paieye]

All right, as advised in the thread 'First Aid failure,' I have invested in an external hard drive. What I cannot work out is how to format it. Can some kind soul give me a very simple list of the steps involved ? My apology, I have found the very simple, though rather startling, answer onine

 

[KALLT]

It is simple. You should check out the ‘Help’ menu in Disk Utility. It provides a manual and helpful articles.

Essentially, you open Disk Utility and select the disk on the left side. You need to select the top-level item, i.e. the hardware, not any volumes below it (if present). In the bottom half it should tell you the partition map, which should be GUID. If that is the case, then you can simply click on ‘Partition’ to set up your disk, if it isn’t, then you select ‘Erase’ instead and pick GUID. You should pick Mac OS Extended (Journaled) as the format if you intend to use the disk with Macs only, or exFat if you intend to use the disk with other operating systems.

 

[paieye]

Simple, you open Disk Utility and select the disk on the left side. You need to select the top-level item, i.e. the hardware, not any volumes below it (if present). In the bottom half it should tell you the partition map, which should be GUID. If that is the case, then you can simply click on ‘Partition’ to set up your disk, if it isn’t, then you select ‘Erase’ instead and pick GUID. You should pick Mac OS Extended (Journaled) as the format if you intend to use the disk with Macs only, or exFat if you intend to use the disk with other operating systems.

Yes, many thanks.