Reformat Hard Drive do i select GUID or

[TFL167]

Just quick question.

Im about to reformat new WD my passport 2TB. This drive is for storage and i know to use Mac os extended but further along on the selections under options do I do need to select 1 of these options GUID partition or Apple partition I want to partition this drive in 2.

Also this H/D says to reformat before use for OS X but must i erase it first to erase the setup folders and such that is on the drive already

 

[rkaufmann87]

Just quick question.

Im about to reformat new WD my passport 2TB. This drive is for storage and i know to use Mac os extended but further along on the selections under options do I do need to select 1 of these options GUID partition or Apple partition I want to partition this drive in 2.

Also this H/D says to reformat before use for OS X but must i erase it first to erase the setup folders and such that is on the drive already

Follow the steps in

http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201909

 

[TFL167]

Thanks I followed that, very helpful!

But for my info as Im learning the iMac os what does the GUID do and will it cause any issues down the line if it were enabled

 

[tillsbury]

Just a thought... if you format it GUID you could start by putting a Yosemite installation image on there, such that if you have a problem you can boot from it and do your restore. It doesn't take much space, then you can use the rest for storage. I have an old 300Mb external drive I did this with, makes reinstallation super-quick...

 

[rkaufmann87]

Thanks I followed that, very helpful!

But for my info as Im learning the iMac os what does the GUID do and will it cause any issues down the line if it were enabled

Your welcome. The GUID partition makes the drive bootable. If you are using the drive as a bootable clone (Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper) this is critical. However if you are using the drive as a Time Machine drive or a drive to store data on it's not as important. When I format new drives I always partition it as GUID because it never hurts to be prepared.

 

[Mr. Retrofire]

...I have an old 300Mb external drive I did this with...

300 Megabit HDD/SSD!?

 

[tillsbury]

300 Megabit HDD/SSD!?

I meant Gb, as in capacity, sorry...

Can't get used to this Tb stuff. Remember spending a fortune on the first >1Gb hard disk any of us at work had ever seen, full height 5.25" running on an EISA RAID card. That was a beast! Had to be formatted as 13 drives, of course, because of the 32Mb drive size limit...