Setting up 2nd hard drive for Mac OS X

pathofthorns19

Registered
Hey. I recently put a new 120 GB Western Digital hard drive in my Powermac G4 733. It's recognized in Disk Utility, but partitioning doesn't seem to work. I tried formatting it for free space, but it acts like it does it in 3 sec or so, something I think is not possible. I want it to be my primary, and make my 40 GB the secondary, but OS X is on the 40. I'm thinking of giving it to my (agh!) PC friend to format it for free space. My question is, what do I do in Disk Utility to set up the hard drive, partitioning or not, and how do I make OS X run from the 120 instead of the 40.
Thanks.
 
Using Disk Utility, you either format it for one partition, or multiple partitions, not free space. Once that's done, you can either install OS X on that drive, or a partition on that drive, or use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your 40GB drive to the new drive. Then you would just select your startup disk in the Startup Disk PreferencePane.

http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html
 
Doesn't any partition with OS X on it have to be formatted as OS Extended?
And as I recall, formatting is pretty quick.
 
I may be wrong on this but I think you're comparing formatting too much to PCs. Every HD I've partitioned and "initialized" with Panther or Jaguar has been done with blazing speed. I think after you partition the system just needs to allocate the free space not actually write some mysterious format on the disk(s).

Even in XP (gasp) you can choose a "quick format" in NTFS that only takes seconds.
 
Back
Top