How to format USB drive????

[LawyerRon]

A friend picked up a 1TB Seagate USB drive to use for storage. It’s sold for a PC with no mention it will work with a Mac. Is it possible to format this drive for use with a Mac? His Mac is a G5 running OS-X. He tried to format it for Mac and he was unable to, so I’m wondering is there is some sort of utility he can download to format it. TIA

[Lespaul20]

I am not a Mac user but I'm pretty sure it can read FAT file systems. Is there a particular error that came up when formatting? Can he format it on a PC with FAT32 and see if it works then? Again, I'm not a Mac user so I can't tell you how to do anything within the OS.

[LawyerRon]

There was an error but he didn't write it down. The Fat32 idea might work though.

[juppy]

Dunno if this will help, but this guy's telling about how he tried to format an external and kept getting errors until he got the correct method from Western Digital's website. (Yeah, I saw you said this was a Seagate, but maybe the procedure is the same). If this is how your friend tried to do it, then sorry, don't know what else to tell ya.....not a Mac user.
http://fcproducer.com/2008/05/how-to...e-for-the-mac/

[LawyerRon]

Thanks, I'll check it out.

[mknabster]

What kind of computer are you going to be formatting it on, a PC or Mac? The 1 TB is probably formatted with master boot record with NTFS, which is why the MAc does not see it. There's this little program called Paragon NTFS, which gives Macs the ability to see and format with NTFS. If you get this, your Mac will be able to see the drive. I have the program, and it works like a charm: http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/ I wouldn't bother formatting it for FAT at all, because you can't transfer files larger than 2GBs on it. give the Paragon trial a shot, I gaurantee that it'll work, it does for me.

[strollin]

Paragon NTFS is the way to go if the friend wants to be able to plug the drive into either a Mac or a PC. If the drive is to be used exclusively with the Mac then it's best to delete the NTFS partition then create and format a MAC partition. OS X has the tools to do this but I don't have access to a Mac right now and I can't remember the name of the system tool to use. The NTFS partition may need to be deleted on a PC first, it's been awhile since I've done it.

[mknabster]

Yea, if you want to use it just for the Mac, you have to format the drive for FAT on your PC, then go back to the Mac, go to Disk Utility, Partition, options, select GUID partition table, then HFS Journaled, and press format. Then you have a purely Mac hard drive. Now if you want a PC to be able to see and read from the newly formatted Mac drive, you need a program called MacDrive: http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/. I also have this, considering I have 3 hard drives which are all GUID, and it works, though sometimes Windows has issues with transferring large files on it (windows explorer freezes).