Installing new Hard Drive

[Gill]

I am in the process of installing a hard drive and after following these steps (http://macs.about.com/od/applications/ss/diskutilformat.htm) from this site I now realize that I did not partition the the new hard drive. The HD is formatting now , has about 8 minutes left ....should / can I partition it after it finishes. If so just make 1 partition but how large.

Well I went ahead with the install anyway and it seems to be working... so what happened ??? Did it create it's own partition when I formatted the hard Drive ??Or is the volume one big partition!

Thanx
Gill

 

[Detrius]

Unless you told it to zero the drive or scramble the data, it absolutely should not under any circumstances take EIGHT MINUTES to format the drive.

Also, you're wasting your time zeroing the data. I feel like I've said it a million times, but if you have to zero the drive to fix your problems, then you have a bad drive. What happens is it takes the bad blocks and maps them out to spare sectors elsewhere on the drive. If this has to happen to make problems go away, then your drive is failing.


That being said, you wouldn't be able to use the drive at all if there were no partition table. If you just tell it to erase the drive, it puts a default partition table on the drive, where there's a small EFI volume at the front (for firmware updates), and the rest of the drive is taken up by the primary volume.

 

[Gill]

Thanx for the reply

Actually I was installing a new hard drive and following the instructions from the website in the previous post. I thought it was odd that I should have to zero out a new hard drive but I was following the instructions or so I thought.
Anyway when I erased the drive it did put a partition on it so I installed OS X and in the end everything worked out fine.
My Macbook is up and running again!!

Gill