August 09, 2004

Initializing USB drives

I bought a new 160 gig drive for the lab. It came unformatted. I put it into the USB2 enclosure where it will live temporarily and plugged it into the PC. The PC recognized the drive but I couldn't figure out how to format it. None of the disk-sounding programs would even look at it because it was uninitialized.

So, I plugged the drive into my Mac, ran Disk Utility, saw the drive, formatted it as a DOS drive, and ejected it. When I plugged it into the PC again, there it was as F:. I could then re-format it in NTFS mode, which is what I wanted.

Note to Microsoft: people want to format new drives that are in USB enclosures. Making them do it on a Mac is not helpful. Posted by lookit at August 9, 2004 09:16 AM