Erasing disk or volume?

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DNA1977 Author

Level 1

8 points

Erasing disk or volume?

Hiya all,

First of all, what is the difference between the disk and volume? As far I think, disk is the hard drive and each partition is called volume. Am I right?
To my question, if I need to erase (disk or volume) what "volume format" should I select, and what does each volume format option do? To make life a bit difficult, I'm totally new to Mac, and wishing to use my external hard drive as a backup for both Mac and Windows (if possible). Thanks.

MacBook, 2.4 GHz, Mac OS X (10.5.6)

Posted on Dec 25, 2008 11:00 AM

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Answer 1

Network 23

Level 6

12,351 points

Dec 25, 2008 11:11 AM in response to DNA1977

Your guess is pretty much correct. A disk is hardware and volume is software, and partition is a form of a volume. So if you have a simple hard drive with three partitions, you have 1 disk and 3 volumes. Or if you have a 4-drive RAID 0 (appears as a single drive), you have 4 disks and 1 volume.

As to formatting for backup, the only choice in Disk Utility that works for both Mac and Windows is MS-DOS, which I think is FAT32. That should work fine unless you want to store files larger than 4GB which the old FAT32 format cannot do. If you need to store files that big, you need NTFS which the Mac doesn't format or write to by default, you would need to format as NTFS from Windows and use additional software to write to NTFS on the Mac side.

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Answer 2

Kappy

Level 10

362,007 points

Dec 25, 2008 11:54 AM in response to DNA1977

You should not back up a Mac to a Windows formatted drive. Only use a Mac formatted drive to back up your Mac. You can partition a hard drive such that one partition is formatted Mac OS Extended and the other is formatted FAT32 (or NTFS if formatted from a PC.) In order to do that you will need to first partition the drive using the GUID partition scheme. You can do this using Disk Utility.

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Answer 3

DNA1977 Author

Level 1

8 points

Dec 25, 2008 1:23 PM in response to Kappy

Thank you both of you for your replies.
I managed to format or Erase the disk (external hard disk). I don't know if I did it or it was by default that the "volume format" was "Mac OS Extended (journaled)". When I looked at the volume of my external hard disk, the volume format was "Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, journaled)". What is the difference between these two volume formats? Also, as these two volume formats are "different", would that make any future difficulties for either backing up my Mac (and programmes) and/or Time Machine (and retrieval of data)?

Thanks

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Answer 4

Kappy

Level 10

362,007 points

Dec 25, 2008 6:51 PM in response to DNA1977

You should avoid using the case-sensitive filesystem. Not much is compatible with it. If you have used that format, then it would be wise to change it by reformatting the drive Mac OS Extended (Journaled.)

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