#Format hard drive for mac osx how to
#Format hard drive for mac osx install
#Format hard drive for mac osx Pc

What the author says is that a mounted NTFS drive can not be erased until it is unmounted but non-boot HFS/+ drives certainly can be.

That is a rediculous comment, have you actually tried out what you say? If you go to Disk Utility it will show the erase option as being available in most situations whether you choose the disk or the partition unless the drive is the currently active boot drive. Had the drive been formated in other ways to begin with, the same problem could've occurred and the same solution could be possible. The author was confused about the differences between formating a volume versus formating a drive. The fact that it was originally NTFS really had nothing to do with the hint.

#Format hard drive for mac osx how to

While those of us know that you can't currently format a NTFS drive with the current version of Disk Utility, I bet many who would search and find this would be confused.-īut if I wanted to find out how to format an NTFS drive into, as an example, unpartitioned space, wouldn't I still search for '10.3', 'format' and 'NTFS'? Meanwhile, this page will live in search indexes as '10.3' 'format' 'NTFS' 'hard drive'. If you think it was so obvious as to what the hint said that the drive was ultimately formated as, then please tell us what the format of the drive became after the hint was applied.-Īrbitrary the hint is completely unrelated to which format the poster needed the drive in, all the matters is that the format itself was unavailable. I think this is relevant given the fact that a drive can be unformatted, and the act of formatting would create an NTFS-formatted hard drive.-Ī drive could be unformatted and a drive could be formatted as NTFS but this is not relivant to the sentance in question. Strictly speaking, the sentance fragment should read 'create a file'.

You wouldn't tell someone to create an old file or create a current file. The word 'new' in that example is completely unnecessary. If adjectives always referred to nouns as they currently exist, then you'd be told to 'create a nonexistent file. I point this out just in case anyone else decides to do this and accidentally puts a chunk of their personal data out into the world. I did a 'write 8 times format' in order to clear the drive.

#Format hard drive for mac osx Pc

I can now donate the PC to a youth artist group, knowing that the person who gave me the PC in the first place won't have all their data out there in the mean old world.

#Format hard drive for mac osx install

I could read the disc, but when I went to Disc Utility to wipe it and reformat it, the option was greyed out.Īfter some futile searching, I was ready to boot up off of an OS X install disc (as one hint had suggested), but then figured I'd try one more thing - I ejected the volume, and then, voila, I could format it as an unmounted volume. Instead, I pulled the hard drive out of the PC and plunked it into a USB2 enclosure, which I then plugged in to my Mac. I had an NTSF-formatted Windows XP hard drive in a PC box, and I was too lazy to plug in a keyboard, mouse, and monitor. This might be something that all the experts here know about already, but I was stumped by it initially, and was happy to figure out a solution.