# Formatting an external hard drive with my Mac Mini.  HELP!!



## CAGuy (Nov 26, 2011)

I have a mac mini 2010 model with snow leopard.  I use the mac mini ONLY in my recording studio and just to record music with garageband.  I have an external hard drive I want to hook up to the mac mini so I can store my music on it and now use up all my internal hard drive space.  Can someone PLEASE explain to me how to format the external hard drive to my mac mini AND also explain how to store the music on the external hard drive?  THanks and God bless!!


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## DeltaMac (Nov 26, 2011)

Connect your external hard drive to your mini
Open Disk Utility (it's in your Applications/Utilities folder)
Choose your hard drive from the list on the left. It's the line that shows the manufacturer's info for your hard drive.
Click the Partition tab.
Click the Options button, and click GUID for partition scheme.
Click OK.
Make sure Format is Mac OS Extended (journaled), and name your partition, if you like.
Click the Apply button.
That will take just a few seconds, then quit Disk Utility
And - your hard drive is completely ready for use.

And drag any files that you want to store on the external to that drive, which will have an icon on the desktop. You can organize those files by making folders for the files that you copy to your external.
Once the copy is complete, remember that the original file is still remains on your internal drive, so you can drag those on your internal drive to the trash, then, empty the trash. Even in the trash, files continue to take up space on your hard drive until you actually empty the trash.

And - you could set up your Garageband, so new files are always saved to your external drive, or just use a Save As... and browse to your external drive, so the file is saved there, and not on your internal at all.


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## CAGuy (Nov 26, 2011)

Thanks!! How would I go about setting up garageband to store on my external hard drive??  

Thanks for the detailed explanation!


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## DeltaMac (Nov 26, 2011)

Looks like there's no actual setting for that in Garageband - so you can simply use Save As from the file menu when you are ready to save a song. Browse to the external drive in the Save As dialog box, and you should be fine.


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## CAGuy (Nov 27, 2011)

Thank you! I will give this a try today!  I greatly appreciate your help!


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