How to Format a Hard Drive in Mac OS X

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Jason, former Mac genius and today we are going to talk about formatting a hard drive. To do this we need an external hard drive which I just happen to have here. This is an external bus powered drive so I don't need this plugged into a power supply. I just brought it for the sample because this will allow me to do it so I'm going to plug it in to our firewire port on the side there and you will see it here in a moment and here it is down here at the bottom. So what I am going to do is we put our disc utility down in the doc earlier and I am going to launch that over here and you'll see it show here. I am going to select it from the list and say erase. This is if you want to erase the disc but we are going to go to partition and what this does is it will allow us to make more than one partition and there are some preset partitions here. The advantage to having your hard drive partitioned is that if one sector, like this untitled one area, if that were to go bad, all the files that were untitled two sector would not be affected so we would still have access to that. So it is always a good idea usually to partition your hard drive. We are just going to stick with one partition now and we are going to call this OWC because I brought it through other world computing and we are going to unclick and install Magdeluxe 9 drivers and that is really not necessary. When I click on the partition button it is going to let me know that everything on this disc is being erased so you want to make sure that when you are partitioning or erasing a hard drive that all the information you want is off of that drive because it will erase it. So we are going to click on partition and you will see it do its thing it dismounts it. It is creating our partition mount and it remounts it and we are done. There is our new hard drive and it is blank and ready to go. So I am going to drag that to the trash to reject it and that is how you format a hard drive. Again using partitions is actually kind of a good thing. So that is how you partition a hard drive. I'm Jason, ex-Mac genius and I will see you next time."