Thursday, December 18, 2008

Reformat FAT32 Drive to HFS+ When Disk Utility Gives an Error

I bought a new Seagate 1.5 TB drive (Windows version, which is cheaper than the Mac version, and I don't need firewire). Usually, reformatting a FAT32 Windows drive to Mac's HFS+ format is a snap in Disk Utility. However, it gave me an error and wouldn't format it.

After looking around, I found the solution at
http://www.wilko.com/weblog/index.php?url=archives/112-Reformatting-a-FAT32-drive-to-HFS+-Never-trust-a-GUI.html#feedback

Just open Terminal and type
diskutil eraseDisk "Journaled HFS+" "[DRIVE NAME HERE]" disk1

In about a minute, the drive is HFS+ formatted.

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