Format Lacie External hard drive from Windows to Mac

Try opening disk utility and select your Lacie external hard drive. Click erase and choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled), type in a name for the disk and then click erase.

This should reformat your disk.

Journaling is a technique that helps protects the integrity of Mac OS Extended file systems on Mac OS volumes, basically keeps it fine and dandy!

Hope this helps

QES said:

I have tried using Disk utility to re-partician the drive (it was the only option that I could run) but it hangs soon after starting.

Click to expand...

Uh-oh... I remember reformatting one of our three OWC Neptune Ext. Hard Drives and having that happen. It had to be replaced.

That hanging shouldn't last more than two minutes, even for real big drives. Like, partitioning a 160GB Ext. device takes maybe 5 seconds. Did you have zero all data or 8-way active? Because either of those two will delay the partitioning by a few hours.

Do you have any third-party disk utilities? If so, try running a diagnostic on the drive.

Also, can you access and use the drive in the Finder? If Disk Utility can see it the Finder should be able to use it, too, since Windows formats are supported on the Mac.

Journaling is a good thing to turn on. Basically, before a file transfer, the disk controller writes a note on the hard drive "I'm moving file X from A to B." It then copies the file from A to B. Deletes the copy of the file at A and then deletes the note. So, if there is a power failure anywhere in that process, there is sufficient information for the controller to figure out where it left off and no data physically lost or spatially lost on the platter.