How do you reformat an external firewire drive from DOS to Mac?

I bought a couple of external firewire drives from Fry's, and as is common for Fry's, someone bought the drive, used it, returned it for their money back and left it with a bunch of material from a music video that they were cutting. They also formatted the drive to DOS. For some reason, disk utility will only let me erase it while keeping the DOS format. I want to format it to macintosh extended and don't want to purchase a new piece of software to do it. Any suggestions?

You can do it several ways. Simplest is to use UTILITES- disk utility in the apps folder.


Connect the drive to the computer. Turn it on . Open disk utility. In disk utility reformat it. Select your drive on the right- Click erase and it will give you a pull down I use the MacOX Journaled so that it has an HFS on it for recovery if needed.



Cheers,

John

John, if you read my post above, it says that I tried to use the disk utility to erase it and the only option that the program will give me for format is DOS. Again, disk utility will only let me format it as a DOS disk. I'm looking for either a work-around to get disk utility to format it as a mac disk or another freeware program that will let me do the same thing.

Michael, quick questions:

1) What kind of drives

2) What version of OSX do you have

3) In Disk Utility are you clicking on the disk (the topmost icon at the left) or the partition (the icon below and indented)? Both have different options in the Format pop-up.

Hi John,

Thanks for asking the appropriate questions. I clicked the disk this time as opposed to the partition (indented below) and was able to successfully reformat the drive MaxOSX Journaled.

Thanks again for your help.

Best,

Mike

Sorry about that. Had some one walk in mid read.



Cheers,

John

Hope this isn't too late, but you don't want a media drive Journaled - that's only for a system drive. Too much i/o overhead for video. I think you can turn it off easily enough, especially if you haven't started putting files on it yet.

Scott

Hey Michael, very smart of you to reformat the drives before using them. An extremely important but often neglected step. I usually spend the extra time to "Write zeroes" as well -- haven't really noticed a difference in performance, though.

Thanks for the info Scott. I actually did start to copy files on to it, but the nice thing about computers is that you can let them do this sort of stuff while you have lunch/a siesta/whatever.

I reformatted it to mac os extended and am re-coping the files.

Best.

Mike

writing zeros is more a security thing than anthing else, i believe.
it just writes random data throughout the entire drive.
it doubt it would effect perfomance, so i wouldnt bother with it.

nick

Yeah, I haven't noticed any case where it helped. Superstition, probably. Maybe a super-fragmented drive benefits from it? In any case, it takes something like two hours to format a 200GB drive versus just 10 seconds without Write Zeroes, so I'm guessing it's not a superstition that's worth it.