On Nov 3, 2007, at 4:32 PM, Charles Riggs wrote:
I bought a basic 250GB FreeAgent drive made by Seagate, and now I have to reformat it in order to use it on this eMac. You're supposed to use Disk Utility to do this, but I have absolutely no idea how this is done. All these years of using Macs, from Performas to Leopard, and never had a backup drive.
Run Disk Utility (Applications -> Utilities -> Disk Utility). Select the new drive in the left hand column of drives (select the drive, NOT the volume on the drive, so you want the one further to the left in the hierarchy showing the drive and then the volume(s) on the drive indented below it).
After you select the drive, go to the Partition tab (if you don't have a partition tab, then you selected the volume and not the drive). On the Partition tab, set the Volume Scheme to 1 Partition and the Format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Then click the Options button and chose GUID if this is for an Intel Mac or Apple if this is for a PPC (or Intel if you don't plan to ever be able to boot from it on the Intel).
Then click the Partition button. That will partition and format the drive. If you are confident the drive is good, that is all you need to do. If you are not confident, you can go to the Erase tab, set the Volume Format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled), click the Security Options button and set it to Zero All Data, then format it. That will walk the drive writing zeros to every single block, which will exercise them and map out any bad blocks it finds.
Now your drive is ready for Mac use.
Do I just drag and drop the file to be saved to the hard drive image on the desk top? Is it better to use a program for this purpose, or just to do it yourself when you think that you have a file that you want to save? I very likely won't save EVERYTHING, so am wondering how to proceed on this. Sounds stupid to realize that I waited this long, but am open to guidance and tutelage on how to work these things. Thanks - Charles.
If you are using Leopard (I read your other post, but I wasn't clear if you ended with Leopard or rolled back to 10.4). Then just turn on Time Machine and let it do all the backup work for you. If you are not using Leopard, then I recommend you check out either SuperDuper or CarbonCopyCloner (even if you are using Time Machine in 10.5, you may still want to check out the other two as they will make bootable clones of your drive, which can be really handy should your main drive fail, you can just boot off your backup and be back up and running that fast).
-chris <www.mythtech.net> ___________________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe send a mail message with a SUBJECT line of "unsubscribe" to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> or <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
