
- #Format wd external hard drive how to
- #Format wd external hard drive mp4
- #Format wd external hard drive full
- #Format wd external hard drive portable
Most people associate hard drive formatting with erasing a hard drive.

Let’s first talk about hard drive formatting, file systems and how formatting doesn’t necessarily erase all data from your drive.
#Format wd external hard drive how to
We’ll show you how to format your hard drive on Mac and Windows computer operating systems, and explain key settings on both operating systems.īefore getting to that, though, it’s important to understand what hard drive formatting is.
#Format wd external hard drive portable
In this guide on how to format external hard drives, we’re going to help you make sure your portable disk works with everything. It can also be used to prep a hard drive for use with another operating system. Formatting allows you to overwrite all the information on the hard drive, resetting the file structure and how the drive interacts with the operating system. If you’ve run into issues with your hard drive, formatting is one of the first steps you should take to troubleshoot it.
#Format wd external hard drive mp4
#Format wd external hard drive full
Whatever course of action I take to correct these problems - I would like the knowledge that I have a full backup to restore from if things "head south" while I look to correct the HD permission issues.Īnyone out there with some REAL SMART ideas that can help me out here ? AND it appears I have permission errors on my internal HD. I can't do a TM backup on the old Firewire disk - due to the program errors. I can't perform a Time Machine backup - as it can't see the maxtor disk. I can't format the maxtor external disk in order to manually copy over my disk content, it doesn't even show up in disk Utility or in Finder. Ran Verify again and it still reported some permission errors. I did, and this stated it fixed a few things. I ran "Verify Disk" on my internal macbook HD and it reported some permission errors and mis-reported file sizes and told me to "Repair Disk".

I naturally thought there was a prob with the ext drive, so knowing that I had at least a good full back-up on there, bought a new ext drive (larger) to perform a full backup on so I could reformat the firewire drive and utilise it elsewhere - but got errors when I tried to set it up as a Time Machine drive seconds after I took it out of the box. Errors were (not verbatim) "error writing files" & "unknown error". I had noticed some strange errors a week ago when Time Machine was reporting an error saying it had failed (this was using a nother external firewire drive). I'm getting the same errors from both my USB ports when I try to format a brand new Maxtor 1TB drive.
