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I'm looking to format an external hard drive for use exclusively Mac OS X (for use with the time machine feature), but the Mac that I'm using is too slow to format the entire harddrive.
Considering I own a PC that's much faster than that, is there any way I could use Linux or Windows to format it for Mac OS X?
leeand00
Posted 2011-07-02T19:09:12.883
Reputation: 14 882
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OS X uses HFS+ as the file format for external disks. Note that Apple only supplies read-only drivers for Windows, which means that there's no easy way to write.
However, there are a couple of commercial tools to format as HFS+ using Windows:
TransMac for Windows can open Macintosh format disk drives, flash drives, CD/DVD/Blu-ray media, high density diskettes, dmg and sparseimage files. [...] Format disks for use on Mac
MacDrive™ 8 allows Windows users to open, edit and save files on Mac disks. [...] What if you need to format a Mac disk or create and delete partitions on a Mac drive? You can, using the powerful MacDrive Disk Manager.
Both offer free trials though.
That being said, I don't see why a Mac would be too slow to format a drive. Be on the safe side and just do it on the Mac, even if it takes a while longer.
slhck
Posted 2011-07-02T19:09:12.883
Reputation: 182 472
Why would the Mac be too slow to format a hard drive? – slhck – 2011-07-02T21:47:11.087
@slhck Because it's an iMac G4 (quite old). (Much like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/larsa/3333151930/)
– leeand00 – 2011-07-02T22:24:49.6931I thought the speed a harddrive is formatted at relied more upon the cabling/data transfer than the speed of the system... – Vervious – 2011-07-03T00:00:29.287
1@Nano8Blazex You're right, the ports on the iMac are USB 1.1 – leeand00 – 2011-07-03T03:27:28.910