External HD needs formatting

hndsmman · #1 February 12th, 2008, 04:06 AM

My external has been acting weird lately like crashing and just today it started not letting me trash anything off it. So I investigated more into and fiquired out that when I bought it second hand I forgot to format it for Mac. It's formatted with MS-DOS File Systems (FAT32) all this time. Now I don't if that's the reason for the weirdness lately but I think it should be formatted???

Question-although be it a lazy one, is there anyway to format an external HD with moving everything off of it? it has over 67GB of things on it. I can't move it to the internal, cause my poor little G4 is only 19GB. If there isn't anyway to do it, I will have to start burning DVD's I guess. Just wanted to check though.

Finnigan · #2 February 12th, 2008, 07:19 AM

I'm new to this and taking a wild guess here, but this is the first thing that popped into my mind.

How big is the drive?

If it is bigger than say 140GB, then maybe partition the drive and reformat the empty half. Copy files from old half to new half. Then reformat old half?

I'm not sure it can be done, but I recently had Ubuntu repartition a windows drive without damaging Win XP that was already on it. the only thing was it recommended I defrag the drive before partitioning.

macworks · #3 February 12th, 2008, 11:59 AM

You'd have to move the files to another drive before formatting unless you get real cleaver with something like iPartition (or another tool that will allow you change drive partitions on-the-fly).

If the data is important to you (as in irreplaceable), then I would suggest that you get/borrow another drive, back up your data first, then reformat as Mac OS X Extended (Journaled).

hndsmman · #4 February 13th, 2008, 12:30 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Finnigan

I'm new to this and taking a wild guess here, but this is the first thing that popped into my mind.

How big is the drive?

If it is bigger than say 140GB, then maybe partition the drive and reformat the empty half. Copy files from old half to new half. Then reformat old half?

I'm not sure it can be done, but I recently had Ubuntu repartition a windows drive without damaging Win XP that was already on it. the only thing was it recommended I defrag the drive before partitioning.

Would that work?? by partitioning you can formatt each half separetly?

Finnigan · #5 February 13th, 2008, 08:34 AM

Unfortunately, as I said, I am not that familiar with Mac Disk utility, but I KNOW when you install Windows XP on a disk with multiple partitions (or you create multiple partitions upon install), you format one partition at a time, and I KNOW when you install Ubuntu on a machine without an OS, you do the same. If you install Ubuntu on a machine WITH an OS, you can repartition the current drive without damaging the existing OS, reformat the new partition(s) and install Ubuntu to make a dual boot machine.

Considering this, that is the option/method I would look for first on the Mac.

I'll say again, I'm not positive a Mac will do it, but it is the first thing I would investigate.