Mac Tip: Reformatting a Windows External Hard Drive
Category: Apple/Mac OS...
Posted Wednesday, January 30, 2008 at 08:38 AM [GMT-6]

This is a rather obscure topic that won't be of widespread interest, but for those who need it, it can be a time saver.

When my wife's laptop motherboard and hard drive crashed recently, we send the drive to a data recovery service (and I hope to write about that experience at some point). They were successful in retrieving her data and sent it back on a tiny Western Digital USB 80-gig hard drive. Unfortunately, the drive was formatted as NTFS, a Windows format that is read-only for Macs. We could copy the data from the drive, but we couldn't delete or add files to it (my wife took the opportunity to switch to a Mac, so we had no further need for a Windows hard drive).

I figured, no big deal; I'll just reformat the drive using Apple's Disk Utility application and we'll have a new Mac disk for backup. I connected the drive to my PowerBook, fired up Disk Utility...and was surprised to see that the drive was grayed out in the Erase tab of the program. There was no apparent way to reformat it.

I did a quick search on Apple's support site and found nothing of use, but a Google search led me to this post on MacOSXHints.com, where the secret was revealed. It's very simple, really; here's what you do...

WARNING: The following process will result in the deletion of all data from your hard drive, and its conversion to a format that is unusable by Windows computers. DO NOT do this unless you're absolutely certain it's what you want.

"Eject" the hard drive by clicking the arrow next to its name in the Desktop sidebar, but leave it physically connected to your computer. The drive's icon will disappear from the Desktop, but the drive will be accessible to the Disk Utility application as an unmounted volume. Under the Erase tab of Disk Utility, you can select the drive to be reformatted, and also select the new format you wish to use. You can also rename the hard drive. Click the "Erase" button and after a brief time, you'll have yourself a brand spankin' new (more or less) drive ready to fill with Mac file goodness.

Again, this process reformats a Windows NTFS hard drive into a Mac (or Unix) format. If you wish to share the drive between a Mac and a Windows machine, this is NOT the way to do it. But, that's a whole other topic.

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Comments

Eric, re: "This is a rather obscure topic .....

I was going to post something like, "This is an obscure post" ..... but there's nothing new about THAT!

Posted by: Jeff at January 30, 2008 09:25 AM
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