External Hard Drive Help

[crunchyapple]

Hi,

I have a 15" MBP. I got (as a gift) a hard drive that was formatted in NTFS and I was reading some website about how to format it into HFS+ since I couldn't do anything with the hard drive with my Mac.

Anyway, I launched disk utility and clicked Partition, but I guess I shouldn't have since the hard drive was ejected and now when I plug it into my USB ports it says "the disk you inserted was not readable by this computer" with three options: initialize, ignore, eject. When I plug it into a PC it doesn't load or show up at all.

I don't have any data on the drive so I'll do anything to fix it! Losing data isn't a problem for me since the drive was empty to start with.

Does anyone have any ideas??

 

[Dimwhit]

Will Disk Utility read it if you plug it in again? Click the 'Initialize' button when it comes up. I think that launches Disk Utility. Rather than Partition, just do an erase and pick the format you want. That should create a Mac-usable hard drive. If you want multiple partitions, do that next. Should work fine then.

 

[crunchyapple]

Wow, that was a lot easier than I thought it would be!

Thanks!

 

[heySparky]

Wow, that was a lot easier than I thought it would be!

Isn't that one of the reasons you got a Mac?

 

[james6000]

Currently I have a NTFS formatted drive and moved all the data in order to format it. Which volume format should I use, there's so many options!! (Journaled, Case-sensitive etc)

 

[frankblundt]

Generally, for Mac only use, just go with the standard: Mac OSX Extended (Journaled).
If you need it be able to be used by Windows as well then choose MS-DOS (=FAT32) although it's a bit of an old dog as formats go, or get a copy of MacDrive which allows Windows to read/write to Mac formatted volumes