I have a 80g mac mini. I'm now down to 2g on my internal hard drive so I decided to buy an external hard drive. I got a 250g external Maxtor 250GB DiamondMax Plus 9 IDE Hard Drive 6Y250P00EM installed in a OKGEAR-3.5" Hard Drive Enclosure 2.0 USB. At first it was kinda weird cause I would plug everything correctly and it wouldn't show on my desktop. After a bit it just popped up. I've never had a external drive so I don't know if I just drag and drop there or what. I tried dragging into the external hard drive but it says that it cannot be modified and it bounces the files. The hard drive came with a software disc but it has nothing on it that says is for a mac. I don't know what to do if there is anyone that can give me really good instructions that would be great.
Your hard drive probably came formatted in NTFS, the windows filesystem which only Windows can write to. (OSX can read but not write to this format). To check if this is the case, open up Disk Utility and select the volume. Down the bottom of the disk utility window it will display all the information about the volume, including the format. If it is NTFS, you will need to format the drive. Select the parent device, click on the 'erase' tab and select the format you want- you probably want Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Then click erase.
This is what it says about the external hard drive Mount Point : /Volumes/New Volume Capacity : 233.8 GB (250,994,386,944 Bytes) Format : Windows NT Filesystem Available : 233.7 GB (250,919,149,568 Bytes) Owners Enabled : No Used : 71.8 MB (75,235,328 Bytes) Number of Folders : 0 Number of Files : 32 I don't know what you mean by parent drive. I tried selecting the 80g inernal hard drive and the external drive but everytime I do either and try to do the erase and selecting the new format it brings up this display that wont let me select it. Like the faded looking ones that doesn't allow you to select anything.
Ok I found out what you mean by parent drive. However when I switch the volume format to Mac os Extended(Journaled) a security option and a erase button pop up. The security one tells me all about erasing stuff and the erase one just tells me if I want to delete what ever is on the external drive. I thought I was just gonna select the new format and press ok.
To reformat a drive you need to erase whateveer is on it, so if there is anything you have on the drive that you want to keep, just back it up somewhere else. With the security options, just choose don't erase data (as you haven't been able to use the disk so there isn't anything you want permanently removed on it yet...) So just click erase and bob's your uncle.
Ok now it's doing something stupit. If eject the drive and turn it off,when I turn it back on it doesn't show on the desktop. Is there a way I can located when It doesn't show on the desktop
