Using Terminal to format a drive

Question

Using Terminal to format a drive

How can I use Terminal to format a partition?

I have one drive formatted as Window NT and another one that was a part of a RAID. Disk Utility won't let me erase either drive.

There must be some brute force way to format a parition through Terminal.

iBook 12 2004

Posted on May 15, 2007 8:11 PM

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Answer 1

May 15, 2007 8:25 PM in response to Navarro Parker -

Not sure of the specifics, but I think the commands are called pdisk (MacOS) and fdisk (PC). The man page has some info, type:

man pdisk

in Terminal.

http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/Current/pdisk-5/pdisk.html
http://www.onecomputerguy.com/install/fdisk.htm

You might be able to successfully initialize the drives with a third-party disc utility for OS X, with a more familiar Mac OS GUI interface.

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