Text 22053, 74 rader
Skriven 2006-10-05 22:35:14 av Alan Zisman (1:123/789.0)
  Kommentar till text 21981 av JEAN PARROT (1:123/140)
Ärende: Format ?
================
In article <23947$WIN95@JamNNTPd>,
 "JEAN PARROT -> ALAN ZISMAN" <1:123/140> wrote:

 JP>      Hello Alan, nice talking to you !

 JP>          When I get home, now that there is a G 4 in the place, I would
 JP>     like to set up an external HD, firewire, to try and save these PW
 JP>     protected HDs. How do you format a HD in that USB port from a Mac ?
 JP>     All steps please, if you have time. I had a look but could not find
 JP>     the command icon, it ought to be possible on a Mac, no ?

1) Since Macs are able to read FAT16/FAT32 drives, if the external drive
is already formatted for FAT there's no need to reformat it for Mac...
you can format it if you want, but it's not needed. If it's NTFS
however, I believe you'll need to format it.

2) Formatting a drive (internal or external doesn't matter) on a Mac
isn't generally done from the command line-- I suppose you could do it
from the (Unix) Terminal, by why would you want to? (And most of your
DOS commands wouldn't work at the Terminal's command line anyway).

Here's what to do-- though since this is off topic, we really should be
doing this via email:

a) Attach the drive to the Firewire (or USB) port... (You refer to it as
both a Firewire and USB drive-- it could be either (or both)... if you
have a choice, you'll get better performance connecting to a Firewire
port).

b) Look in the /Applications/Utilities folder for a program named Disk
Utility. Double-click to open it.

c) It should show a list of connected drives along the left-- including
both your internal hard drive and the external drive. You can't use Disk
Utility to format the drive that you booted from. (If you ever need to
format your internal hard drive, you'll need to boot to a CD-- Apple
includes a copy of Disk Utility on all its OS install CDs).

You'll se both drives listed twice-- once (as best as I can tell) for
the 'raw hardware' and once for the formatted partition on it. The
second example is indented underneath the first one. If you click on the
top of the two (for the external drive), you'll see options including
Erase (which means Format) and Partition (which will destructively
repartition and format). If you click on the second one, you won't have
the Partition option, though you'll still have an Erase option.

(There are also other options such as First Aid-- which does the Mac
equivalent of Scandisk/Chkdsk, RAID, and Restore (to restore the disk
from a drive image-- similar to using Ghost-- Disk Utility can also be
used to create drive images)

3) If you pick either the Partition or Erase option, you'll see that you
can choose between several 'Volume Formats', basically between several
Mac OS formats, so-called MS-DOS (FAT32), or a Unix format.

If you are wanting to use the drive with both Macs and PCs, pick
'MS-DOS'... if you are only going to use it with the Mac, pick one of
the Mac Extended formats. You'll get better performance on the Mac with
a Mac Extended format.

Note that you can't partition a single disk to have both an MS-DOS (FAT)
and Mac Extended format... which is too bad.

Another curious thing-- WinXP's Disk Manager won't create FAT32
partitions larger than (I think) 32 GB... Apple's Disk Utility can
create large FAT32 partitions-- and they will be recognized by WinXP. I
think that with large FAT32 you're back to loosing a lot of the capacity
to cluster slack-- just as was the case with 1 or 2 GB drives formatted
with FAT16 back in the early 1990s.

If you have more Mac-related questions, please email me!

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