Mac won't read my external hard drive!

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Mac won't read my external hard drive!

I bought a lacie 500gb external harddrive at the same time as my mac bookpro, the salesmen said it was a good drive and it would work seamlessly with my computer. I open the box and the instructions are easy: connect the power adapter to the drive, then connect the drive to the computer (I chose to use the firewire400 over the usb) then wait a few seconds and it will read the drive. After waiting the "few seconds" a message popped up saying there was an error and that the disk was not properly formatted. What to do?

The one thought I had is that the computer should be connected to the internet, which I wasn't any time I tried to connect the drive. Please Help!

MacBookPro, Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Posted on Aug 25, 2006 12:52 AM

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Answer 1

Aug 25, 2006 1:39 AM in response to DustinLane

Don't worry, it's not too bad.

A drive has a partition scheme and a formatting scheme. You can have a single or several partitions and there are several mehods of formatting a drive.

You can format the drive through the disc ultilty (applications/utilities). Once formatted it should show up (You can name the drive and select the format - usually mac OS Extended journaled) or FAT 32 if you want to use the drive on a windows PC also.

Some people partition a drive into 2 or more sections - with one section the same size as your internal HD for backup purposes and the rest for data. If you want to divide it up into separate discs (partitioning) you can do that from the disc utility too - just move the slider. If you are hoping to create a bootable backup on one of the partitions then make sure you use GUID as the partitioning scheme from options. Once you've moved the slider select each partition and make sure it is named and formatted.

Best of luck

(PS - If you think you might want to use it for bootable backup later- make sure you partition using GUID now from options - even if you only want a single partition - ie the whole drive. This is because if you re-partition later all data on the drive will be destroyed.

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