How to set up an external hard drive for use with OS X?

Description

It is recommended to take some precautionary steps when you are attaching a new external hard drive to your Mac. The most important thing that you need to do is the drive you are using should be preformatted to FAT32 as it is readable and writable in both Windows and OS X systems. But, FAT32 drives always come with Master Boot Record partition scheme so it doesn’t allow OS-supported encryption.

                              




Solution:

In order to format the drive, attach it to your system and open Disk Utility. Now, follow the below steps:

1. First, select the drive device from the list of devices. This item is located above any storage volumes on the drive and given with its manufacturer name, media size, etc.

2. Next, choose the “Partition” tab that appears.

3. From the drop-down menu, select “1 partition.” When you select the new partition, all new partition will be formatted to Mac OS Extended by default. For confirming this, select each partition in the partition diagram and then choose the format for it.

4. Now, click the “Options” button and select “GUID” as the partition scheme.

5. At the end, click “Apply” to the changes.

After this, the disk is ready to use. For further testing of drives, you can use third-party tools like Drive Genius or Tech Tool Pro. Secure Erase is one option of Disk Utility that can be used to test each storage block of a device for lessening the number of problems with the drive.

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