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aaagat111

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 12, 2005
204
0
St. Louis, MO
I just ordered the Lacie 160GB External HD, and was wondering what to first do with it when i receive it. Can i just plug it right into my powerbook, or do i need to format it for Mac OSX beforehand.

-AAA
 
aaagat111 said:
...Can i just plug it right into my powerbook, or do i need to format it for Mac OSX beforehand.

Plug it into your Powerbook, open Disk Utility (it may even prompt you to do it automatically) and format it right there and then.
 
Plug 'n play, baby! I just got my "One Touch II" 300GB External Maxtor drive and it's awesome... Plug'n play man... plug'nplay :D
EDIT: Wow, that was fast, two people got here before me. I'm slow. :eek:
 
Applespider said:
Decide whether you want to partition it before you start using it; makes life much easier than deciding that afterwards.

My 250GB has 2 partitions. One for my PB back up and one for archived stuff/video stuff etc

That's what I do as well 2 partitions. One is an exact clone of my iBook and the other one is used for movies,videos and such.

Congrats on your new Lacie External HD. Did you get the Porsche design or the d2?
 
lilstewart92 said:
Plug 'n play, baby! I just got my "One Touch II" 300GB External Maxtor drive and it's awesome... Plug'n play man... plug'nplay :D
EDIT: Wow, that was fast, two people got here before me. I'm slow. :eek:
The OneTouch was almost certainly formatted NTFS or FAT32 - even if it showed up right away, for Mac-only use it would be beneficial to reformat HFS+ (Mac Extended) before using.
 
CanadaRAM said:
The OneTouch was almost certainly formatted NTFS or FAT32 - even if it showed up right away, for Mac-only use it would be beneficial to reformat HFS+ (Mac Extended) before using.
yeah, I did that, the directions said so. I didn't wanna screw up my $300 purchase. But, in most cases, all you have to do is plug'n play.
 
Thanks...

I want to have a back up of my pbook on the hd, as well as archive other files, therefore formating it with 2 partitions sounds like a good idea. What exaclty is a partition though? am i reserving a set amount of space for one thing or group.

-AAA
 
aaagat111 said:
What exaclty is a partition though? am i reserving a set amount of space for one thing or group.

A partition is like dividing the drive in two or more parts. Each partition will show up as a separate drive on your Mac. You can't easily change the size of partitions without erasing the drive's contents so consider carefully whether you need to do this and what sizes you want.
 
^^what he said. ^^

The way I partitioned my External HD:

Partition one : 60GB* = exact size of my iBook HD for backup purpose.

Partition two: 100GB* = for videos and such and of course some junk.


*not quite that much free space due to the formating and such....
 
adk said:
also, download Carbon Copy Cloner to backup your hard drive. I agree with everybody that you should partition your drive, one for backup, one for storage.

The solution that works for me is to just have one partition, and do backups of my PowerBook using Lacie SilverKeeper to a folder on the external drive.

My PowerBook's drive is 80Gb, but the amount of space that I actually use fluctuates widely... so if I had an 80Gb dedicated partition on my external drive, I'd have some wasted (unused) space. (and with a ton of video/music/photo stuff... every bit of space on my external drive is important)

I can see why some people would want 2 partitions... but just having 1 works well for me.
 
good stuff

I have a 200GB d2 model, have it Partitioned. Half is a mirror of my hard drive, the other half is for Visual Media. Hope everything works out for you.
 
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