How To Format New Hard Drive For Mac

The same process applies to both hard disk drives, or HDDs, and solid state drives, or SSDs. After deleting the volumes, or partitions, on the drive, you can format the drive and create new volumes. Remember to back up any files you want to keep before starting this process. Deleting and formatting destroys all data on the drive. Oct 27, 2017 - How to Format or Partition an External Hard Drive for Mac. Three weeks ago, I bought a brand new 2TB Seagate Expansion to backup my.

• How To Format A New Hard Drive For Mac And Pc

This how-to shows you the steps using Disk Utility 13 in OS X 10.10 Yosemite, but the process is the same if you’re using OS X 10.9 Mavericks or 10.8 Mountain Lion. Sometimes you want to wipe out all the data that’s on a hard drive or solid-state drive—erase it and start over. The best way to do this is to format the drive, which both erases the drive and prepares it for storing data by mapping out bad sectors, creating address tables for locating the data on the disk, and more. Similarly, you may have purchased a new drive that was formatted for Windows out of the box.

How To Format A New Hard Drive For Mac And Pc

You'll want to reformat that drive for your Mac. But formatting a drive so that it can be used as your Mac’s startup drive requires a slightly different procedure than formatting it for use as a secondary drive for storing data. Click the Erase tab if it’s not already selected. At the bottom of the window, you’ll see some information about the drive you have selected. Look at the Partition Map Scheme entry. If it says GUID Partition Table, you can format the drive by selecting Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) in the Format pop-up menu, giving the drive a name, and then clicking Erase.

(Remember: This erases everything on the drive!) You can now skip directly to Step 8. If the Partition Map Scheme says Master Boot Record or Apple Partition Map, you need to continue to step 5.

Installed a new debate 500gb 7200 rpm 32mb cache SATA SSD Hybrid hard drive on a mid 2009 MacBook pro unibody. First question the screen is jumping with horizontal lines flashing different colors. Problem 2: when I boot from original 10.6 disk and go to the disk utility to partition and format the new drive it says it is shows the new drive I select the single partition mac journaled and name it Macintosh hd and select apply. The status bar says unmounting disk it barber poles for a minute or so then give an error box that says 'partition fIled with this error: POSX reports: the operation couldn't be completed cannot allocate memory Help. I know this post is old but I was having the same problem with my 2009 MBP and thought others may be too. Orignal HD quit and I couldn't boot under any mode. Oddly enough when I disconnected the HD and plugged it back in, it fully booted before crashing, then back to the original failure to boot every time after.

I bought and installed a new SSD but wasn't able to format/erase due to the same 'cannot allocate memory' error using Disk Utility or Terminal. After playing with the SATA cable a bit just to make sure it had good connections I was able to format the drive and install 10.6 with no problems. I think that would explain why unplugging the original HD and plugging it back in allowed it to boot once. It's been a day since I installed OSX on the new SSD and I haven't had any problems.

I'm going to replace the SATA cable just to be sure, but I think this may be the problem for others with older MBPs who are trying install a new drive. If you're having this problem trying formatting the new HD via a USB/SATA cable (instead of in your macs HD bay) before you return the drive or give up. Worst case you'll rule out the SATA connection, but this worked for me.