Formatting & Partitioning a Hard Drive in OS X - Tiger and Leopard

8/7/2019 Formatting & Partitioning a Hard Drive in OS X - Tiger and Leopard

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Formatting & Partitioning a Hard Drive in OS X - Tiger

and Leopard

Partitioning a hard drive is the process of dividing a hard drive intoseparate, discrete sections, called 'volumes'. You can create up to16 different partitions on a hard drive, each one can be of differentsize and format, even including the 'MS-DOS' format for use withPCs on a network. With hard drives getting bigger there are reasonswhy you might want to partition a hard drive. Partitioning can beused for organization purposes, i.e., each volume could be used as amedia (scratch) drive, each for a different FCP Project. I typically

partition into two volumes, one for FCP Captured media, the secondfor DVD SP projects, for Builds and MPEG 2 encoded files. WithFireWire external hard drives reaching one Terabyte in size,partitioning the drive can make project and file management muchmore manageable.

Formatting When you purchase a new hard drive for your Mac, either SATA/ATA(internal) or FireWire (external) the box that the drive comes in willlikely tell you that the drive will run on both Macs and PCs. This istrue, but because the drive is formatted for cross platformcompatibility, some stability and facility issues could arise. It ispossible that your new cross platform hard drive could have a 2 gigfile size limit. Using the drive for FCP (and encoded files for DVD SP)could cause problems. 2 gigs is good for about 9 minutes of DVcapture. Capturing clips longer than 9 minutes could result in thecaptured clip being broken into separate files. So ... whether youintend to partition your hard drive or not, you really should reformatyour new hard drive for the Mac. If your new hard drive is FireWireand you intend to use it with both Macs and PCs, then leave it as is

and do not reformat.

Tiger and Leopard The process of formatting and/or partitioning a hard drive is exactlythe same for both Tiger and Leopard. However, the Disk Utilityinterface has change a bit from Tiger to Leopard.

In Leopard When you launch Disk Utility in Leopard, it opens in default, with nodrives selected in the left hand column. If you will look at the tabsnear the top of the Disk Utility window (red box below), you will

notice that the tab 'Partitioning' is not available as it was in Tiger.



Select the hard drive that you wish to partition in the left handcolumn. Once you have select a hard drive to partition, the Partitiontab will now appear along with the other tabs near the top of thewindow, (red box below).

In the Partition tab, my Disk Utility is shown below. You will note

that both the Name and Format sections are grayed out, (red boxbelow). This is because the drive that I have selected has already



been named and formatted and is currently in use. These option willbecome available once we have set the new partition scheme. Alsonote that the "Mac OS 9 Drivers Installed" box is checked. Unlessyou have a specific need for OS 9 drivers, leave this box unchecked.

In the Partition tab select the number of partitions that you want

from the 'Volume Scheme' drop-down menu. As shown below, I haveselected 2 partitions.



Once you have set the number of partitions in the Volume Scheme'drop-down, select one of the partitions. When a partition is selected,as noted by the blue bounding box, (red arrow below), you will

notice that both Name and Format, (red box below) have nowbecome available for this partition.



Name your partition and then select your format. You'll want Mac OSExtended (Journaled) for a partition that you will want to serve as aboot (start-up) volume. Select Mac OS Extended (No Journaling) forvolumes that will be used as media or data storage drives. You canchange the alloted size of the partitions by dragging the little button

found between the the partitions in the Volume Scheme section, upor down, (red arrow below).

Select each partition and then name and set the format. When youare done, click on the 'Apply' button.

In Tiger If you are going to partition your new drive you can skip down to thePartition section below, as when you partition your hard drive, youwill reformat the drive during the partition process.

1. After you plugin your new hard drive and attach it to your Mac viaa FireWire cable, the hard drive will mount on your desktop.



2. Open Disk Utility. Applications folder > Utilities folder > DiskUtility. Select the hard drive in the left hand column and click on theErase tab.

3. In the Volume Format drop-down menu, select Mac OS Extended(Journaled) if you plan to place the Mac Tiger operating system onthis drive to make it a bootable drive. Select Mac OS Extended if youplan to use the drive as a media (capture scratch) drive.



4. Name the drive.

5. Install Mac OS 9 Disk Driver

There is an option to Install Mac OS 9 Disk Drivers. If you plan onusing the hard drive with a Mac booting from OS 9, or believe thatthis might be a possibility, then select the checkbox to install theMac OS 9 drivers. You do not need to install the Mac OS 9 drivers touse the disk with the Classic environment.

6. Security Options. When the default setting 'Don't Erase Data' isused, only the Directory information (information used to locate fileson the hard drive) is erased leaving the actual files intact. Thismeans, that for awhile, there is the possibility of recovering files.Over time the files will be over-written with new files thusdestroying the data. For the paranoid there are three additionalsettings to insure that no data can be recovered from the harddrive.



7. Once you have selected the format and have named the drive,click on Erase. You will be presented with the 'Are you Sure' dialogbox. Note that the volume still has the name 'untitled' because theprocess has not yet run. After 'Erase' the name will change to yournew name.

8. Click the Erase button again. The Erase process will take just aminute to erase and reformat your new drive.



Partitioning With the new drive mounted, open Disk Utility. Applications folder >Utilities folder > Disk Utility. Select the hard drive in the left handcolumn and click on the Partition tab. The drive will be displayed asone volume, 'Untitled'.



1. In the 'Volume Scheme' drop down, select the number of

partitions you want to have. For this example I have selected 2partitions.



2. Click in the top partition box to select it. Enter a name for this

partition (External Boot) and from the 'Format' drop down menuselect "Mac OS Extended Journaled". We do want Journaling turnedon for a boot drive or volume.





this volume as well.

5. Now it's time to size each of the partitions. Place your cursor in

between the two partitions, it will turn into a up/down arrow. Clickand drag up or down to change the size of the partition, (red arrowbelow). As you drag, the new size of the 'selected' partition will bereflected in the 'Size' box, (blue arrow below).





Ignore Ownership When you have finished formatting and partitioning your new harddrive, there is one more chore. If you plan to use this new drive as a'media drive' for storage rather than as a Mac OS X System bootdrive, you may want to insure that all files on this drive will alwaysbe read-write accessible to everyone (all Users), even when thedrive is moved to a different Mac. This is important for Firewire harddrives being used as media (scratch) drives for FCP and other apps,as it will make the drive and its files accessible (read-write) on anyMac. To accomplish this, select the hard drive icon on the desktopand 'command i' from the keyboard which will open the 'info' dialog

box. At the bottom of the window, make sure that the 'Ignoreownership on this volume' box is checked. If this drive is to be usedas a Mac OS X System boot drive, never select "Ignore ownership".



Cryptic Error Message There have been some reports of problems when attempting to reformat some drives (Western Digital). If you have a new drive andattempt to re format the drive as Mac OS Extended, you could getan error message that says "unknown error with the partition map". This problem can occur because of the differences between a PPCand Intel Mac. Here is the work around.

Open Disk Utility and select the drive in the left hand column (thedevice not the volume) and then click on the Partition tab. In thePartition tab, click on the Options button.



In Options you'll see several choices, the first "GUID Partition Table"

is for Intel-based Macs. The second choice "Apple Partition Map" isfor PowerPC-based Macs. Select the choice that is appropriate forthe Mac you are on, then click OK. You should now be able to formatthe drive as Mac Os Extended with Journaling on or off.



UNIX. A word of caution, the Mac OS X has UNIX at its core. There isone keyboard item that is reserved for UNIX exclusively. It is theforward slash, (/). Never use the forward slash in the name of adrive or partition, file, folder, bin, project, sequence or anywhereelse for that matter.

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Formatting & Partitioning a Hard Drive in OS X - Tiger and Leopard