Formatting external drive

[kevin1182]

Hey everyone,

I purchased this hard drive:

edit: add some details so it comes up in a search. Fantom Titanium II TFD1000U16 1TB External Hard Drive

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822204068

It mounted right away, but was formatted fat32. I went to format it as Mac OS Extended, and it gave me an error. I actually found under the reviews that someone else had this problem:

User review:

Other Thoughts: For Mac users, you have to partition this drive as a GUID first before you can format it HFS+ Journaled. If you attempt to to format HFS+ without doing so, it will not work, it will fail every time. There is no statement of this at all on FD's site or in the manual. It just took some trial and error by myself to figure this out. Would of given this product five stars but they obviously have a QA problem, I don't know if it is on WD or FD side, but they both need to get it together on this.

What do they mean by GUID? How do I do that? I tried for a little bit to get it to format using disk utility, but to no avail.

Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks,

Kevin

 

[yellow]

Select the drive info in the left hand window, select Partition tab, select Options button. There you go.

 

[Consultant]

Open Disk Utility

On the left side, click the harddrive,
example "149.1 GB FUJITSU ..."

On the right side one of the tabs will be Partition, click on the Partition tab
Go under Options to choose partition scheme.

 

[kevin1182]

Thanks!

Great, thanks much that did the trick. It is funny that you need to do that to get the drive to work. It doesn't mention that in the instructions. Hopefully others that get this drive will find this thread.

By the way, the drive is a great deal right now and seems to be working well (so far, a lot could still change!). So far I would recommend it, other than the lack of clear instructions.

Kevin

 

[wiseguy27]

To use a hard disk and format it on a different operating system, you have to partition it and set the partition type.

In your case, the default was FAT32, which is primarily from Windows. Mac OS X supports HFS+, but it expects the partition to either be "Apple Partition Map" or "GUID Partition Table" - as the "Options" dialog in Disk Utility says, the former is for use as a bootable partition for PowerPC Macs or as a non-bootable partition for other Macs and the latter is for use as a bootable partition for Intel based Macs.

The partition type for FAT32 disks is set to MBR (Master Boot Record). Note that FAT32 is compatible with many operating systems. HFS+ is usable only on Mac OS X (or in Windows with a commercial app called MacDrive).