imac disk utility

8/12/2019 Imac Disk Utility

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Revised December 3, 2007

May, 16, 2005

Formatting & Partitioning a Hard Drive in OS X - Tiger andLeopardByKen Stone

Partitioning a hard drive is the process of dividing a hard drive intoseparate, discrete sections, called 'volumes'. You can create up to 16different partitions on a hard drive, each one can be of different size andformat, even including the 'MS-DOS' format for use with PCs on anetwork. With hard drives getting bigger there are reasons why you might

want to partition a hard drive. Partitioning can be used for organizationpurposes, i.e., each volume could be used as a media (scratch) drive,each for a different FCP Project. I typically partition into two volumes, onefor FCP Captured media, the second for DVD SP projects, for Builds andMPEG 2 encoded files. With FireWire external hard drives reaching oneTerabyte in size, partitioning the drive can make project and filemanagement much more manageable.

Formatting

When you purchase a new hard drive for your Mac, either SATA/ATA(internal) or FireWire (external) the box that the drive comes in will likelytell you that the drive will run on both Macs and PCs. This is true, butbecause the drive is formatted for cross platform compatibility, somestability and facility issues could arise. It is possible that your new crossplatform hard drive could have a 2 gig file size limit. Using the drive forFCP (and encoded files for DVD SP) could cause problems. 2 gigs is goodfor about 9 minutes of DV capture. Capturing clips longer than 9 minutescould result in the captured clip being broken into separate files. So ...whether you intend to partition your hard drive or not, you really should

reformat your new hard drive for the Mac. If your new hard drive isFireWire and you intend to use it with both Macs and PCs, then leave it asis and do not reformat.

Tiger and LeopardThe process of formatting and/or partitioning a hard drive is exactly thesame for both Tiger and Leopard. However, the Disk Utility interface haschange a bit from Tiger to Leopard.

In LeopardWhen you launch Disk Utility in Leopard, it opens in default, with no drivesselected in the left hand column. If you will look at the tabs near the top
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of the Disk Utility window (red box below), you will notice that the tab'Partitioning' is not available as it was in Tiger.

Select the hard drive that you wish to partition in the left hand column.Once you have select a hard drive to partition, the Partition tab will nowappear along with the other tabs near the top of the window, (red boxbelow).


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In the Partition tab, my Disk Utility is shown below. You will note that boththe Name and Format sections are grayed out, (red box below). This is

because the drive that I have selected has already been named andformatted and is currently in use. These option will become available oncewe have set the new partition scheme. Also note that the "Mac OS 9Drivers Installed" box is checked. Unless you have a specific need for OS 9drivers, leave this box unchecked.


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In the Partition tab select the number of partitions that you want from the

'Volume Scheme' drop-down menu. As shown below, I have selected 2partitions.


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Once you have set the number of partitions in the Volume Scheme' drop-down, select one of the partitions. When a partition is selected, as noted

by the blue bounding box, (red arrow below), you will notice that bothName and Format, (red box below) have now become available for thispartition.


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Name your partition and then select your format. You'll want Mac OS

Extended (Journaled) for a partition that you will want to serve as a boot(start-up) volume. Select Mac OS Extended (No Journaling) for volumesthat will be used as media or data storage drives. You can change thealloted size of the partitions by dragging the little button found betweenthe the partitions in the Volume Scheme section, up or down, (red arrowbelow).


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Select each partition and then name and set the format. When you aredone, click on the 'Apply' button.

In TigerIf you are going to partition your new drive you can skip down to thePartition section below, as when you partition your hard drive, you willreformat the drive during the partition process.

1. After you plugin your new hard drive and attach it to your Mac via aFireWire cable, the hard drive will mount on your desktop.

2. Open Disk Utility. Applications folder > Utilities folder > Disk Utility.Select the hard drive in the left hand column and click on the Erase tab.


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3. In the Volume Format drop-down menu, select Mac OS Extended(Journaled) if you plan to place the Mac Tiger operating system on thisdrive to make it a bootable drive. Select Mac OS Extended if you plan touse the drive as a media (capture scratch) drive.

4. Name the drive.


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5. Install Mac OS 9 Disk Driver

There is an option to Install Mac OS 9 Disk Drivers. If you plan on usingthe hard drive with a Mac booting from OS 9, or believe that this might bea possibility, then select the checkbox to install the Mac OS 9 drivers. You

do not need to install the Mac OS 9 drivers to use the disk with the Classicenvironment.

6. Security Options. When the default setting 'Don't Erase Data' is used,only the Directory information (information used to locate files on the harddrive) is erased leaving the actual files intact. This means, that for awhile,there is the possibility of recovering files. Over time the files will be over-written with new files thus destroying the data. For the paranoid there arethree additional settings to insure that no data can be recovered from thehard drive.


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7. Once you have selected the format and have named the drive, click onErase. You will be presented with the 'Are you Sure' dialog box. Note thatthe volume still has the name 'untitled' because the process has not yetrun. After 'Erase' the name will change to your new name.

8. Click the Erase button again. The Erase process will take just a minuteto erase and reformat your new drive.

PartitioningWith the new drive mounted, open Disk Utility. Applications folder >Utilities folder > Disk Utility. Select the hard drive in the left hand columnand click on the Partition tab. The drive will be displayed as one volume,'Untitled'.


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1. In the 'Volume Scheme' drop down, select the number of partitions youwant to have. For this example I have selected 2 partitions.


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2. Click in the top partition box to select it. Enter a name for this partition(External Boot) and from the 'Format' drop down menu select "Mac OSExtended Journaled". We do want Journaling turned on for a boot drive orvolume.


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3. I have the "Install Mac OS 9 Disk Drivers" box checked. These driversshould be installed for machines that can boot into OS 9. If OS 9 driversaren't present on the drive, you can't mount that drive from a machinerunning OS 9. If you want to boot into OS9 from this drive, or access itwhile booted into OS 9 from another drive/partition, its imperative thatyou install OS 9 drivers when you initialize or partition. Even for systemsthat don't boot into OS 9 it is a good idea; its possible to mount such adrive via Firewire T mode from another machine, which can come in handyin rare maintenance situations. It doesn't hurt to have those drivers there,and you never know when you might need them.

4. Now select the second partition, give it a name and set Format to MacOS Extended (Journaling off) as this volume will be used as a Capture

Scratch drive. Note that Mac OS 9 drives are installed on this volume aswell.


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5. Now it's time to size each of the partitions. Place your cursor inbetween the two partitions, it will turn into a up/down arrow. Click anddrag up or down to change the size of the partition, (red arrow below). Asyou drag, the new size of the 'selected' partition will be reflected in the'Size' box, (blue arrow below).


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6. Repeat the above process for each of your intend partitions. Once youhave set partitions, named, sized, and selected formats, click on thePartition button. Your drive will be partitioned. This process will only takea few seconds. Be aware that when you partition a drive all information onthat drive will be lost, so be sure to back up any data that you wish topreserve.

JournalingWhen Journaling is turned on for a drive or volume, a continuous record

(a journal) is created by the Mac OS, of the work that you do, i.e.,opening, saving , deleting files, etc. If your Mac crashes or goes down doto a power failure, upon reboot, Journaling will help the Mac OS to getback up and running.

You can turn Journaling on, at any time, for any drive or volume. In DiskUtility, select the drive in the left hand column, then, from the Disk Utilitytool bar click on 'Enable Journaling' (below left). Once a drive or partitionhas Journaling turned on, the only way to turn it off would be to open updisk utility, select the drive you want to turn journalling off, then hold

down the option key and click the file menu - now the 'disable journaling'option will be available (below right).


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Ignore OwnershipWhen you have finished formatting and partitioning your new hard drive,there is one more chore. If you plan to use this new drive as a 'mediadrive' for storage rather than as a Mac OS X System boot drive, you maywant to insure that all files on this drive will always be read-writeaccessible to everyone (all Users), even when the drive is moved to adifferent Mac. This is important for Firewire hard drives being used asmedia (scratch) drives for FCP and other apps, as it will make the driveand its files accessible (read-write) on any Mac. To accomplish this, selectthe hard drive icon on the desktop and 'command i' from the keyboardwhich will open the 'info' dialog box. At the bottom of the window, make

sure that the 'Ignore ownership on this volume' box is checked. If thisdrive is to be used as a Mac OS X System boot drive, neverselect "Ignoreownership".


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Cryptic Error MessageThere have been some reports of problems when attempting to re formatsome drives (Western Digital). If you have a new drive and attempt to reformat the drive as Mac OS Extended, you could get an error message

that says "unknown error with the partition map". This problem can occurbecause of the differences between a PPC and Intel Mac. Here is the workaround.

Open Disk Utility and select the drive in the left hand column (the devicenot the volume) and then click on the Partition tab. In the Partition tab,click on the Options button.

In Options you'll see several choices, the first "GUID Partition Table" is forIntel-based Macs. The second choice "Apple Partition Map" is for PowerPC-based Macs. Select the choice that is appropriate for the Mac you are on,then click OK. You should now be able to format the drive as Mac OsExtended with Journaling on or off.


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UNIX. A word of caution, the Mac OS X has UNIX at its core. There is onekeyboard item that is reserved for UNIX exclusively. It is the forwardslash, (/). Never use the forward slash in the name of a drive or partition,file, folder, bin, project, sequence or anywhere else for that matter.

Enjoy,

--ken

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