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Reformatting a hard drive from NTFS to HFS+

S

sethypoo

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Oct 8, 2003
1,583
5
Sacramento, CA, USA
So I read in this thread that hard drives have to be formatted with HFS+ to work with OS X. I want to buy a hard drive on eBay that is wiped clean but formatted with NTFS; my question is this, how can I reformat the hard drive to work in my yet-to-arrive MacBook?

Thank you!
Seth
 
Reformatting HDD

When I bought my Lacie Drive it came with its own format utility for MAC and PC formats. There would be any number of similar utilities on the net - I would have thought - try googling it maybe.
Also - if rebuilding the OS - there would be a format utility surely? I am not a MAC person (yet!) but certainly logic suggests that you would not be left out in the cold.
Will be very interested to read what other MACsperts have to say. Have a great day!
 
Just use the Disk Utility program that comes with your Macbook. It will be in the Utilities folder in your Applications folder.
 
thewhitehart said:
You can format the drive with disk utility in OS X. It will clean format it as HFS+.
Click to expand...
I doubt it. Disk Utility will recognize the NTFS format, but it refuses to erase disk (for some reason it calls this process "erasing" instead of "formatting.") Anyways, once you present an NTFS formatted disk, it will grey out the options to erase/format the disk into.

Disk Utility requires a format that it can write to, which pretty much means FAT32 if you are buying it from the Windows world. However, Windows XP does not let you format a drive into FAT32 unless you partition the drive into 32GB or smaller pieces. You may have to get a program such as PartitionMagic to format the whole drive into FAT32 if you want partitions greater than 32GB or use Win98. Windows 2000 might let you as well, but I am not sure.
 
I did it through Disk Utility by selecting the numeric name for the drive rather than the fancy name. Then I erased it. It now works fine and I renamed it Booted by Mac.
 
theBB said:
I doubt it. Disk Utility will recognize the NTFS format, but it refuses to erase disk (for some reason it calls this process "erasing" instead of "formatting.") Anyways, once you present an NTFS formatted disk, it will grey out the options to erase/format the disk into.

Disk Utility requires a format that it can write to, which pretty much means FAT32 if you are buying it from the Windows world. However, Windows XP does not let you format a drive into FAT32 unless you partition the drive into 32GB or smaller pieces. You may have to get a program such as PartitionMagic to format the whole drive into FAT32 if you want partitions greater than 32GB or use Win98. Windows 2000 might let you as well, but I am not sure.
Click to expand...

This is patently false. Make sure you're selecting the hard disk and not the volume. Disk Utility will erase anything it can recognize as compatible hardware, including USB sticks.
 
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