I'm having trouble formatting an external drive for Time Machine

[cbsnbiker]

I recently bought a 14" MacBook Pro 18,4 on MacOS 12.6.1. I also bought a new 1 terabyte LaCie external SSD drive for use with Time Machine.

I can't format it as APFS.

I formatted it as MacOS Extended, intending to format it again as APFS. Disc Utility won't let me. When I try to, it says that I didn't do something about GRID. But it won't let me do that either--it doesn't give me that option.

I'm probably missing something obvious, but I don't see it.

Advice?

 

[wchanley]

In Disk Utility, in the View menu, choose View > Show All Devices.

Select the device for the LaCie drive (not the underlying volume) and repartition it using the Partition button in the toolbar. Make a single partition, with a GUID partition map. The volume format can be MacOS Extended, if you want; Time Machine will want to convert it to APFS when you select it in Time Machine in System Preferences or System Settings (in Ventura). You should be able to format it as APFS directly in Disk Utility, though, once it's using a GUID partition map.

 

[chabig]

The "problem" is that the disk came formatted for PC, and you need to change the partition map before you can format the drive.

1. Open Disk Utility
2. Choose View > Show All Devices.
3. In the sidebar, select the storage device you want to erase, then click the Erase button.
4. Click the Scheme pop-up menu, then choose GUID Partition Map.
5. Click the Format pop-up menu, then choose APFS.

 

[cbsnbiker]

"choose View > Show All Devices"

That's the error I was making. I didn't do that. Once I did that, it worked.

Thank you, wchanley and chabig. I appreciate it.