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May, 16, 2005
Jul 02, 2020 You're changing the format of a disk, such as from a PC format (FAT, ExFAT, or NTFS) to a Mac format (APFS or Mac OS Extended). You received a message that your disk isn't readable by this computer. You're trying to resolve a disk issue that Disk Utility can't repair. When the OS X Utilities window appears on the screen, choose the Disk Utility option. In the Disk Utility window, specify the drive that you want to delete and click on the Erase option. Select the Mac OS Extended (Encrypted) format under the format list. Then press the Erase button and set a password for the encrypted partition. Instructions for how to format your external drive so that it will be fully usable in MacOS. These steps can be used for both internal and external drives. Reformatting the drive will erase all data on the drive, so you should copy any data you want off the drive prior to formatting. The following is based on Mac OS X version 10.10.5.
How To Format Hdd For Mac Os X Download
Formatting & Partitioning a Hard Drive in OS X - Tiger and Leopard
By Ken Stone
Partitioning a hard drive is the process of dividing a hard drive into separate, discrete sections, called 'volumes'. You can create up to 16 different partitions on a hard drive, each one can be of different size and format, even including the 'MS-DOS' format for use with PCs on a network. With hard drives getting bigger there are reasons why you might want to partition a hard drive. Partitioning can be used for organization purposes, i.e., each volume could be used as a media (scratch) drive, each for a different FCP Project. I typically partition into two volumes, one for FCP Captured media, the second for DVD SP projects, for Builds and MPEG 2 encoded files. With FireWire external hard drives reaching one Terabyte in size, partitioning the drive can make project and file management much more manageable.
How To Format Hard Disk On Mac Os X
Formatting
When you purchase a new hard drive for your Mac, either SATA/ATA (internal) or FireWire (external) the box that the drive comes in will likely tell you that the drive will run on both Macs and PCs. This is true, but because the drive is formatted for cross platform compatibility, some stability and facility issues could arise. It is possible that your new cross platform hard drive could have a 2 gig file size limit. Using the drive for FCP (and encoded files for DVD SP) could cause problems. 2 gigs is good for about 9 minutes of DV capture. Capturing clips longer than 9 minutes could result in the captured clip being broken into separate files. So ... whether you intend to partition your hard drive or not, you really should reformat your new hard drive for the Mac. If your new hard drive is FireWire and you intend to use it with both Macs and PCs, then leave it as is and do not reformat.
Tiger and Leopard
The process of formatting and/or partitioning a hard drive is exactly the same for both Tiger and Leopard. However, the Disk Utility interface has change a bit from Tiger to Leopard.
The process of formatting and/or partitioning a hard drive is exactly the same for both Tiger and Leopard. However, the Disk Utility interface has change a bit from Tiger to Leopard.
How To Format External Drive Mac
In Leopard
When you launch Disk Utility in Leopard, it opens in default, with no drives selected in the left hand column. If you will look at the tabs near the top of the Disk Utility window (red box below), you will notice that the tab 'Partitioning' is not available as it was in Tiger.
When you launch Disk Utility in Leopard, it opens in default, with no drives selected in the left hand column. If you will look at the tabs near the top of the Disk Utility window (red box below), you will notice that the tab 'Partitioning' is not available as it was in Tiger.
Select the hard drive that you wish to partition in the left hand column. Once you have select a hard drive to partition, the Partition tab will now appear along with the other tabs near the top of the window, (red box below).
In the Partition tab, my Disk Utility is shown below. You will note that both the Name and Format sections are grayed out, (red box below). This is because the drive that I have selected has already been named and formatted and is currently in use. These option will become available once we have set the new partition scheme. Also note that the 'Mac OS 9 Drivers Installed' box is checked. Unless you have a specific need for OS 9 drivers, leave this box unchecked.
In the Partition tab select the number of partitions that you want from the 'Volume Scheme' drop-down menu. As shown below, I have selected 2 partitions.
Once you have set the number of partitions in the Volume Scheme' drop-down, select one of the partitions. When a partition is selected, as noted by the blue bounding box, (red arrow below), you will notice that both Name and Format, (red box below) have now become available for this partition.
Name your partition and then select your format. You'll want Mac OS Extended (Journaled) for a partition that you will want to serve as a boot (start-up) volume. Select Mac OS Extended (No Journaling) for volumes that will be used as media or data storage drives. You can change the alloted size of the partitions by dragging the little button found between the the partitions in the Volume Scheme section, up or down, (red arrow below).
Select each partition and then name and set the format. When you are done, click on the 'Apply' button.
In Tiger
If you are going to partition your new drive you can skip down to the Partition section below, as when you partition your hard drive, you will reformat the drive during the partition process.
2. Open Disk Utility. Applications folder > Utilities folder > Disk Utility. Select the hard drive in the left hand column and click on the Erase tab.
3. In the Volume Format drop-down menu, select Mac OS Extended (Journaled) if you plan to place the Mac Tiger operating system on this drive to make it a bootable drive. Select Mac OS Extended if you plan to use the drive as a media (capture scratch) drive.
4. Name the drive.
5. Install Mac OS 9 Disk Driver
There is an option to Install Mac OS 9 Disk Drivers. If you plan on using the hard drive with a Mac booting from OS 9, or believe that this might be a possibility, then select the checkbox to install the Mac OS 9 drivers. You do not need to install the Mac OS 9 drivers to use the disk with the Classic environment.
6. Security Options. When the default setting 'Don't Erase Data' is used, only the Directory information (information used to locate files on the hard drive) is erased leaving the actual files intact. This means, that for awhile, there is the possibility of recovering files. Over time the files will be over-written with new files thus destroying the data. For the paranoid there are three additional settings to insure that no data can be recovered from the hard drive.
7. Once you have selected the format and have named the drive, click on Erase. You will be presented with the 'Are you Sure' dialog box. Note that the volume still has the name 'untitled' because the process has not yet run. After 'Erase' the name will change to your new name.
8. Click the Erase button again. The Erase process will take just a minute to erase and reformat your new drive.
Partitioning
With the new drive mounted, open Disk Utility. Applications folder > Utilities folder > Disk Utility. Select the hard drive in the left hand column and click on the Partition tab. The drive will be displayed as one volume, 'Untitled'.
1. In the 'Volume Scheme' drop down, select the number of partitions you want to have. For this example I have selected 2 partitions.
2. Click in the top partition box to select it. Enter a name for this partition (External Boot) and from the 'Format' drop down menu select 'Mac OS Extended Journaled'. We do want Journaling turned on for a boot drive or volume.
3. I have the 'Install Mac OS 9 Disk Drivers' box checked. These drivers should be installed for machines that can boot into OS 9. If OS 9 drivers aren't present on the drive, you can't mount that drive from a machine running OS 9. If you want to boot into OS9 from this drive, oraccess it while booted into OS 9 from another drive/partition, its imperativethat you install OS 9 drivers when you initialize or partition. Even forsystems that don't boot into OS 9 it is a good idea; its possible to mountsuch a drive via Firewire T mode from another machine, which can come inhandy in rare maintenance situations. It doesn't hurt to have those driversthere, and you never know when you might need them.
4. Now select the second partition, give it a name and set Format to Mac OS Extended (Journaling off) as this volume will be used as a Capture Scratch drive. Note that Mac OS 9 drives are installed on this volume as well.
5. Now it's time to size each of the partitions. Place your cursor in between the two partitions, it will turn into a up/down arrow. Click and drag up or down to change the size of the partition, (red arrow below). As you drag, the new size of the 'selected' partition will be reflected in the 'Size' box, (blue arrow below).
6. Repeat the above process for each of your intend partitions. Once you have set partitions, named, sized, and selected formats, click on the Partition button. Your drive will be partitioned. This process will only take a few seconds. Be aware that when you partition a drive all information on that drive will be lost, so be sure to back up any data that you wish to preserve.
Journaling
When Journaling is turned on for a drive or volume, a continuous record (a journal) is created by the Mac OS, of the work that you do, i.e., opening, saving , deleting files, etc. If your Mac crashes or goes down do to a power failure, upon reboot, Journaling will help the Mac OS to get back up and running.
You can turn Journaling on, at any time, for any drive or volume. In Disk Utility, select the drive in the left hand column, then, from the Disk Utility tool bar click on 'Enable Journaling' (below left). Once a drive or partition has Journaling turned on, the only way to turn it off would be to open up disk utility, select the drive you want to turn journalling off, then hold down the option key and click the file menu - now the 'disable journaling' option will be available (below right).
Ignore Ownership
When you have finished formatting and partitioning your new hard drive, there is one more chore. If you plan to use this new drive as a 'media drive' for storage rather than as a Mac OS X System boot drive, you may want to insure that all files on this drive will always be read-write accessible to everyone (all Users), even when the drive is moved to a different Mac. This is important for Firewire hard drives being used as media (scratch) drives for FCP and other apps, as it will make the drive and its files accessible (read-write) on any Mac. To accomplish this, select the hard drive icon on the desktop and 'command i' from the keyboard which will open the 'info' dialog box. At the bottom of the window, make sure that the 'Ignore ownership on this volume' box is checked. If this drive is to be used as a Mac OS X System boot drive, never select 'Ignore ownership'.
Cryptic Error Message
There have been some reports of problems when attempting to re format some drives (Western Digital). If you have a new drive and attempt to re format the drive as Mac OS Extended, you could get an error message that says 'unknown error with the partition map'. This problem can occur because of the differences between a PPC and Intel Mac. Here is the work around.
Open Disk Utility and select the drive in the left hand column (the device not the volume) and then click on the Partition tab. In the Partition tab, click on the Options button.
In Options you'll see several choices, the first 'GUID Partition Table' is for Intel-based Macs. The second choice 'Apple Partition Map' is for PowerPC-based Macs. Select the choice that is appropriate for the Mac you are on, then click OK. You should now be able to format the drive as Mac Os Extended with Journaling on or off.
UNIX. A word of caution, the Mac OS X has UNIX at its core. There is one keyboard item that is reserved for UNIX exclusively. It is the forward slash, (/). Never use the forward slash in the name of a drive or partition, file, folder, bin, project, sequence or anywhere else for that matter.
Enjoy,
--ken
copyright © www.kenstone.net 2005
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Apr 30,2020 • Filed to: Hard Drive Recovery • Proven solutions
“How to format an external hard drive Mac? What format system to use when reformatting my storage drive for a Mac?”
This is a frequent question asked by first-time, as well as the not-so-tech-savvy, macOS users. Learning how to format an external hard drive Mac is essential. Because saving all your data on the Cloud is nice and all, but physical storage is still popular. Especially if you don’t have a stable internet connection or if most of your files are large.
Luckily, you don’t have to learn rocket science to be able to format an external hard drive for Mac or PC. The operation is pretty straightforward.
When it comes to your Apple device, there are two methods to use. Read on to find out all you need to know about them.
Part 1: What Is the Best Format for External Hard Drive Mac?
The first step to formatting your external drive for a Mac computer is choosing the right format. There are four possible choices:
- APFS (Apple File System)
- HFS+ (Mac OS Extended)
- exFAT (Extended File Allocation Table)
- FAT (MS-DOS)
To understand which is the best for you, let’s have a comprehensive overview of each of them.
Apple File System
The APFS was first introduced in 2017 as a replacement for the HFS+. Nowadays, all new Macs come with the operating system preinstalled on APFS, as this system is optimized for use with SSD and flash storage drives. However, it still works with traditional HDD drives too.
This is the best format to pick if you have an external SSD or USB flash drive that you don’t intend to use with a Windows device.
The biggest strength of this system is the speed, as well as the encryption and metadata handling. However, you won’t be able to use this system with Time Machine.
Mac OS Extended
The HFS+, or Hierarchical File System plus on its real name, was the main file system used for Mac until 2017.
This type of file system is suitable to use with both HDD and SDD drives, but the latter will perform slightly better with the APFS mentioned above. If you have an older Mac, though, choosing the HFS+ is your best bet.
In general, all external drives formatted to HFS+ work nicely with older Mac versions but are incompatible with Windows.
Extended File Allocation Table
Designed by Microsoft, the exFAT is a good choice if you plan to use the external hard drive with both macOS and Windows systems. Yet, you won’t get top performance on either. This choice is more appropriate for USB flash drives, although you can still use it for SDD and HDD units too.
The main issue with exFAT is that your drive will be more prone to fragmentation when used with Apple devices and is less stable than NTFS on Windows. If you really have to share the drive between Mac and Windows machines, that’s your best option though.
MS-DOS
Macs also support FAT32 drives, marked as FAT in Disk Utility. This format should be avoided at all costs unless you’re dealing with a really old Windows computer, which you really have to use in parallel with your Mac system.
Typically, there is no reason to choose this option unless you’re planning to use the external hard drive on a Windows XP or earlier machine.
Part 2: How to Format an External Hard Drive Mac?
Now that you know which format to choose, it’s time to learn how to format an external hard drive for Mac. There are essentially two methods, with Disk Utility or Time Machine function.
Note: If you plan to format an older external drive, perhaps one you used with another device, make sure to backup all data before proceeding. Formatting is a permanent procedure that can’t be reversed. While there are data recovery software you can use if you lost data, it is always better to prevent.
That said, here’s how to format an external hard drive Mac:
How To Format Hdd For Mac Os X Mac
Method 1: Format Mac Hard Drive with Disk Utility
How To Format Hdd For Mac Os X 10
Disk Utility is a utility application proprietary to macOS that is used to both format and manage internal and external disks. Here’s how to use it:
Step 1 Connect the external hard drive you want to format to your Mac, then start the Disk Utility app that you can find under Applications -> Utilities.
Step 2 On the left side of the Utilities screen, find the name of the external hard drive you want to format and select it. Then, on the top side under the Disk Utility, click on the Erase button.
Step 3 Follow the on-screen prompts to select the desired file system and allow the drive to format. That’s it! After the process is complete, you can either start using the drive or choose to create partitions on it.
Method 2: Format Mac Hard Drive with Time Machine
Formatting an external hard drive with Time Machine is as easy as formatting it with Disk Utility. Time Machine, however, gives you the possibility to create an automatic backup of the data on your hard drive before formatting it.
Before you proceed, therefore, you should first set up the external drive to use with Time Machine.
To do this, open System Preferences and select Time Machine after you’ve connected the external drive to your Mac.
Now, click on Select Disk and select the desired drive from the list. Click on the Use Disk button. At this point, the system will run an automatic backup two minutes after you’ve clicked on the Use Disk button, or you can proceed with the formatting if the hard disk is empty.
Format Drive To Mac
To format an external hard drive for Mac with Time Machine, you must follow the steps below.
Step 1 Open Finder, Applications, then go to Utilities and Disk Utility.
Step 2 Follow the steps above to format the drive, and then you can use it with Time Machine on your Mac system.
Part 3: Bonus Tip – Data Recovery from Formatted Hard Drive on Mac
Sometimes, it may happen that you accidentally formatted an external hard drive containing important data. Whether it’s your wedding pictures or your bachelor’s degree thesis, chances are you want to get that data back as quickly as possible.
If you have a newer version of Mac, you can use the Apple Time Machine to recover your canceled files, or you could choose to use external software, such as iSkysoft.
1. Recover Data with Apple Time Machine
In the former hypothesis, you can try to recover your data with the Time Machine. This app is Apple’s backup feature present on the newer systems. If you followed the steps above before formatting the hard drive with Time Machine and allowed the app to execute the backup, then there are high chances that you can recover any lost data without too much hassle.
To do so, just launch the Time Machine and browse through the folders to see if it has saved the files you require.
For easier browsing, you can use the time stamp feature on the right side of the screen and select the date or time when you executed the backup.
Once you found the files, simply click on Restore to get them back.
2. Recover Data with iSkysoft Software
If you didn’t use the Time Machine function or couldn’t find the files you need, you can try to recover any lost files with trusted third-party software, such as iSkysoft.
Recoverit (IS)
A Life Saver to Solve Your Data Loss Problems!
- This easy-to-use software allows you to recover unlimited lost or deleted files from your Mac device, including photo, video, and audio data, document files, and more.
- It supports all types of Mac files irrespective of their extension.
- The application is compatible with both internal and external drives, USB pens, memory cards, and other hardware, so you can rest assured it will retrieve your data if it’s there.
- It can retrieve data from accidentally deleted files, lost or formatted partitions, data lost due to virus attacks, system crashes, or data lost by the Time Machine.
- It is free to download and supports all leading macOS versions, including the 10.14 release.
3,165,867 people have downloaded it
This system is also very easy to use, in just three easy steps:
How To Format Hdd For Mac Os X Download
Step 1 Install the application and choose the desired location
Download and install the software on your Mac computer, then open it and select the external hard drive, partition, or location where you want to retrieve data.
Step 2 Start the scan to retrieve your lost data
Click the Start button. The software will now scan the selected drive and display all retrieved data in an easy-to-scour list.
Step 3 Preview the recovered files and save them in your chosen location
Review and select the target files, then launch the recovery process. That’s it. The software will restore your lost data.
Conclusion
As you can see, how to format an external hard drive Mac is not particularly complicated. The Disk Utility allows you to format the desired drive to the desired system in a blink of an eye. Backing up the data on your drive with Time Machine also allows you to avoid the recovery hassle.
If you still lost some data, you even know which software to use to recover all lost files.
Now it’s your turn. Use this guide to format your external drive, download, and use the data recovery software if needed, and don’t forget to share this article with your Mac-addicted friends. They might make good use of it too.