Hard drive formatting involves erasing/formating a hard drive or USB flash drive to be compatible with different formats like MAC OS Extended and Windows OS. Wd my passport for mac utilities. Check out the video to learn how to format a hard drive using the MAC Disk Utility. Disk Utility gives you five different choices for drive formats in OS X Lion. Unless you have extraordinary needs, you can safely ignore two of them: Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled. Disk Utility will erase and format the selected drive, resulting in a single volume being created and mounted on your Mac’s desktop. Click the Done button. That's all there is to the basics of formatting a drive using Disk Utility. To boot from an external drive, you first need to install OS X on it. You’ll need to boot from a different volume, such as a Mac OS X installation disc. Disk Utility’s reformatting.

This how-to shows you the steps using Disk Utility 13 in OS X 10.10 Yosemite, but the process is the same if you’re using OS X 10.9 Mavericks or 10.8 Mountain Lion. Sometimes you want to wipe out all the data that’s on a hard drive or solid-state drive—erase it and start over. The best way to do this is to format the drive, which both erases the drive and prepares it for storing data by mapping out bad sectors, creating address tables for locating the data on the disk, and more. Similarly, you may have purchased a new drive that was formatted for Windows out of the box. You'll want to reformat that drive for your Mac.

But formatting a drive so that it can be used as your Mac’s startup drive requires a slightly different procedure than formatting it for use as a secondary drive for storing data. Click the Erase tab if it’s not already selected. At the bottom of the window, you’ll see some information about the drive you have selected. Best news apps for android.

Look at the Partition Map Scheme entry. If it says GUID Partition Table, you can format the drive by selecting Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) in the Format pop-up menu, giving the drive a name, and then clicking Erase. (Remember: This erases everything on the drive!) You can now skip directly to Step 8. If the Partition Map Scheme says Master Boot Record or Apple Partition Map, you need to continue to step 5.