I recently picked up a used 250GB SATA I hdd on eBay. It was previously used with windows XP. I have the install disc for leopard as well. Can I just put the drive in and start using it or do I have to reformat it in a special way?
FYI - I don't have any other HDDs in the Mac; I bought it off of CL without one.
Last Thing: It is a 1.6 GHz with 4gigs of ram.
... Can I just put the drive in and start using it or do I have to reformat it in a special way?
No. Start the Mac with its Leopard installation disc. Use Disk Utility to format the hard disk.
... Can I just put the drive in and start using it or do I have to reformat it in a special way?
No. Start the Mac with its Leopard installation disc. Use Disk Utility to format the hard disk.
A Power Mac can't use an SATA hard drive. You need an ATA/IDE hard drive.
Cheers, Tom 😉
The G5's do. Thats not the point, point is that I was wondering if a old drive needed to be reset if-you-will.
What you need to reset is the formatting used by Windows XP, which is NTFS. An NTFS volume can't boot your Mac, so you'll reformat the hard drive as a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume or volumes - if multiple partitions are desired. You might want to check out this page, which describes the formatting process using Disk Utility.
Do I need to format a used HDD?, Do I need to format a used HDD?
