How to Format a Seagate External Drive on a Mac

When you get that new Seagate external hard drive home and plug it into your Apple Macintosh computer, the new hard drive icon will appear on your desktop. But don't let that fool you. While you can instantly start saving data files to the hard drive, don't. Generally, external hard drives are formatted at the factory for Windows-based computer operating systems, not the hierarchical file system of the Mac.

Things You'll Need

• Apple Macintosh computer
• Seagate external hard drive
• USB or Firewire connection cable
• Seagate power cable
• Disk Utility software

Instructions

1. Set up the Seagate external hard drive near your Apple Macintosh computer and plug in the USB or Firewire cable from the hard drive to the Mac's input. Most external hard drives now come with USB connections, but some still use the Firewire, so it is important to know which one you need. Some Macbooks, for example, have eliminated the Firewire port, so getting a Firewire hard drive won't work for you. The advantage of Firewire, however, is that you can daisy-chain Firewire devices multiple times. You have to have a separate USB port---or use a hub---for each USB device.

2. Plug in the Seagate's power cord and wait for the new hard drive's icon to appear on your desktop. It may be called "Untitled" or "Seagate" or some other variation. Don't worry about changing the name now. You can do that when you format the drive.

3. Go to the Mac's Utilities folder. It will be located in your Applications folder on your computer's internal hard drive. In the Utilities folder, find Disk Utility and double-click it. This will open a dialog box where you can perform maintenance on hard drives, rename them, recover data and format hard drives.

4. Select the new hard drive in Disk Utility's left sidebar. When you do this, the window to the right will have several option buttons at the top: "First Aid," "Erase," "RAID" and "Restore." The one you want is "Erase." This will change the view in the window beneath the buttons to the "Erase" information.

5. Select "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" to the right of "Volume Format." Then type the name you wish the volume on the new hard drive to have in the box to the right of "Name."

6. Click the "Erase" button at the lower right. A dialog box will appear that asks you if you are certain you want to erase all the data on the new hard drive. If you have selected the correct hard drive, click "Erase" in the popup. Since there is not data to erase except previous formatting, the process only should take a few minutes.

Tips & Warnings

• Make certain you have selected the correct hard drive in Disk Utility before approving the erasure of the disk. Otherwise you may erase data from a different hard drive.

References

• Indiana University Information Technology Services website: In Mac OS X, what is Disk Utility, and how do I use it?