[HM] Trying to initialize an external drive

[Tony Johansen]

On 4/9/2005 12:43 PM, "Duane Murphy" <duanemurphy at mac.com> wrote:

> --- At Sat, 3 Sep 2005 14:19:20 -0700, Jane Sprando wrote:
> 
>> So..... What am I doing wrong? This should be so easy and I feel dumb! I
>> went to Apple support, but it doesn't tell me how to initialize!

> By the way, if the drive showed up on the Desktop, you probably didn't
> need to do anything, but maybe it was formatted for Windows, so erasing
> is a good idea.

LaCie HD come formatted with FAT 32 which OS X is able to use and is best
when sharing the HD between Macs and PCs. Consequently many sales people
will tell you (mine did) that it is already formatted for Mac.

Not true, while Mac can use the Windows format, it works much more
efficiently in Mac OS X extended and journaled.

Having learned this via a similar false start, I suspect that LaCie does a
very poor job of communicating these things to end users.

Tony