Question about Formatting Buffalo USB 1TB external drive for use with Mac Book Pro Mountain Lion HD

yours is nitebook, nothing wrong but forum deals with 65lb tower.

what model MBP and does it have Thunderbolt.

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http://www.apple.com/support/macbookpro

Use Apple's Disk Utility in the Applications/Utilities folder to format the drive.

The programs on the drive given to you by the manufacturer is likely backup software (or malware) and essentially worthless, it will be wiped when you format the drive.

I do NOT advise you partition that drive for TimeMachine, rather I advise you not to use TimeMachine at all for your purposes because TM is just a backup, not a bootable drive.

Rather do this.

Get another hard drive that is equal to or slightly larger than your boot drive.

Format the drive in Disk Utiltiy > 1 Partition, option: GUID, Format: OS X Extended journaled, click Erase and move the slider one spot to the right and click Erase. This will take some time as it's going to map off any failing sectors it can BEFORE you lay data on the drive corrupting it.

Next, pay for and download Carbon Copy Cloner, use the default settings and simply clone internal drive to the external drive. this will also take some time the first time.

Next use Disk Utility to Repair Permisisons on both drive. Now reboot the machine and hold the option key down, you can select the external drive clone to boot from!!

You can update the clone the same way by using CCC, but it doesn't take as long, only copying changes.

This is better than TimeMachine as a bootable clone is bootable in case your internal drive fails to boot the machine.

Use the first drive for storage and be very gentle with it while it running, like you should do for all hard drives as they are subjective to shock damage.

The objective with the clone drive is you keep it safe, and not carting it around where it can be more subjective to damage like the other drive will be.

Remmeber you need 2 forms of hardware backup at all times.

Most commonly used backup methods

Connect the drive, now open Disk Utility in your Applications/Utilites folder

Click on the drive on the left and then click on Partitions

This is how you take a screen shot.

Hold the command option and 4 keys down, a cross hair appears, now click and drag it around the image of Disk Utility and then click to take a picture, it will appear on your desktop.

Now when you post, use the camera icon and upload your picture.

That will give us a clue what's going. 🙂