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Accidentally formatted HD wrong... HELP!

eddiexhart

eddiexhart

macrumors regular
Original poster
Dec 13, 2008
214
19
North Hollywood CA
So I was doing a clean install on my MacBook and Booted Up from the recovery drive and went to Disk Utility and hit Erase and now it shows up as Macintosh HD. Now it doesn't show an option to format or erase. AHHH how do I it? :eek::confused:

See...
14j94rd.png
 
eddiexhart said:
So I was doing a clean install on my MacBook and Booted Up from the recovery drive and went to Disk Utility and hit Erase and now it shows up as Macintosh HD. Now it doesn't show an option to format or erase. AHHH how do I it? :eek::confused:

See...Image
Click to expand...

At the time you took the screen shot were you booted from that drive? If so, you cannot erase a drive you are currently booted from.
 
You need to create a partition (or partitions) on the drive.

What you have selected is the physical hard drive itself, which can be split into “virtual” hard drives as far as the operating system is concerned.

So you could split a 750GB drive into a 250GB “System” partition for OS X and your apps, and a 500GB “Media” partition for all your photographs, videos etc.

They would still be on the same disk, but you would be able to format the System partition independently of your Media partition, rather than erasing the whole disk, for example.


In the image you have posted, there are three drives, and two partitions.

The first drive (selected) doesn’t have any partitions.
The second drive is 500GB in size and has a single partition named “OS X” (presumably also 500GB in size)
The third drive is 320GB in size and has a single partition named “Media Drive”
 
Sorry I forgot to clarify. The first one named Macintosh HD is the one I tried to format. The other two are on my other macbook. I had the Macintosh plugged into a external drive enclosure cuz I wanted to see if I could fix it from my other MacBook.

How do I go about creating a partition on the Macintosh HD because the option is not listed.
 
eddiexhart said:
Sorry I forgot to clarify. The first one named Macintosh HD is the one I tried to format. The other two are on my other macbook. I had the Macintosh plugged into a external drive enclosure cuz I wanted to see if I could fix it from my other MacBook.

How do I go about creating a partition on the Macintosh HD because the option is not listed.
Click to expand...
Select “Macintosh HD” go to the partition tab at the top, and select “1 Partition”. It should be formatted as “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”
 
Have you restarted? Looks like a glitch in Disk Utility to me, because you should see two entries where you just see Macintosh HD.

jW
 
I did a disk repair and it shows up okay but this is what it shows under the Partition tab.
I've been at it for days and I can't figure it out!
Help!

33zbdkn.png
 
Disc is locked. If you do an info it's probably read only.

sudo chflags 0 /volumes/*

sudo chmod a+rx /volumes/*

From a Terminal session will probably fix it, if not something deeper is hosed.
 
yep I've recently done the exact same thing to my LaCie external 1TB, I had a 400GB Time Machine Partition and 600GB for external space, deleted the external space partition without erasing the whole drive and now it won't mount/can't use Time Machine...

If you find out a fix let me know, but in the mean time I've ordered a 3TB drive to put in the enclosure, it was time to upgrade anyway haha
 
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