Can't Figure Out How To Format A Disc??

toughbook said:

I bought a 1TB external HDD, G-Drive is the name of it. It is formatted out of the box for Mac when you buy it. Although it does say that you can reformat it for Windows. It is showing up under My Computer and shows me the size and all. In the Disc Management program it shows it being NTFS, howeverif I go to Properties it still shows GPT, which I believe is what Mac uses. Any help out there? How about any good reformatting programs?

Many thanks!

GPT is not a File System it is a way of organising partitions on a disk, the one used by Intel Macs.

GPT stands for GUID Partition Table.

Windows generally uses the Master Boot Record (MBR).

The only things that these partition managers really affect is whether or not an OS can boot from a drive or not (Windows can't boot from GPT, Macs can't boot from MBR) and how many partitions can be put onto the disk.

Read more at Windows and GPT FAQ: Version 1.1.

Can you mount the disk?

If you can mount it and write to it you're good to go.

If you want to format the disk just use the one built into Windows.

Press start, type 'format disk' and hit enter.

Now you'll have a display of all your disks, find the appropriate one, right click and choose the appropriate option.

If you need more help just ask.

Oli

toughbook said:

I was just reading and learning about the GPT stuff. I am doing the formatting right now, but I unchecked the quick box and it is taking forever. What would happen if I hit cancel and redo it without unchecking the quick box?

You might damage the disk but I've done it before and cancelled it and nothing too bad happened. It will take a long time but it will make sure there are no problems with the format (which is especially important i this case).

If you do decide to cancel and do a quick format (which I can't recommend) you do it at your own risk.

Oli

It'd be fine... But IMHO, at least you need to format without the "quick" option at least once, it will check for bad sectors while it's formatting...

FYI: several UEFI enabled mainboard can boot up off a GPT style partition/volume. The single hideous thing that prevents "PC"s from booting off a GPT is BIOS, Mac these days is a "PC" at heart, the difference is that it uses UEFI instead of BIOS, it is by far more modern in hardware sense to a regular PC...

zzz2496