This name includes the formatted size of the drive and the name or abbreviated name of the manufacture. The first or top name, is the name of the hardware, the physical hard drive itself. Looking at the list of items you'll notice that each drive is listed twice, with two different names. All installed (connected) Hard Drives, CD and DVD drives, Partitions, or any Disk Images' that you have on your Mac will be displayed in this column. These items are listed in the left column of Disk Utility, as shown below. When Disk Utility opens it will ask you to 'Select a disk, volume or image'. I use Disk Utility on a regular basis, so I have dragged the Disk Utility icon from the Utilities folder down to the Dock, for quick access.

We want to the launch the Disk Utility application which is found in the Utilities folder inside the Applications folder on your Macintosh Hard Drive. In this case it is named 'Untitled', but could have any name. When I plug it into my Mac, the hard drive icon mounts on the desktop.

Considering that you'll be using this drive for years and that you may be using it to store valuable information, I would suggest that you spend a few minutes to reformat and test the drive using the Mac Disk Utility to be sure that you get off to the best start.įor this article I am going to work with an old LaCie external Firewire drive that I have wiped clean. It could be formatted as 'FAT 32', a format that will run on both Macs and PCs, but does have limitations. You can plug this new drive into your Mac and 'go to work', but this does not mean that the drive is setup in the best manner for the Mac. When you purchased the drive, the sales person told you that it was Mac compatible, just plug it in and go to work. It could be an internal drive but most likely it is an external hard drive that has Firewire 400, Firewire 800, USB 2 or eSATA ports on the back for connectivity to your Mac. You have just purchased a brand new hard drive for your Mac.

Format hard drive in mac