Posted by PS on March 11, 2004 at 18:55:07:
In Reply to: Got A Mac Question For The Board posted by Big Tim on March 11, 2004 at 02:25:13:
:
: I have been getting knee deep in Mac guts the last week or so. I want to find a site or a tutorial that will show me how to format step by step a mac hard drive. I would also appreciate any info that would show how perform or offer a utility to low level format a mac hard drive.
: I have been on about 50 boards and forums and Mac sites, they all give you step by step of what to do when something happens, though none of them tell you "how" to do it. You are just expected to know.
Don't they have an interactive forum where you can ask questions?
Any MacOS System CD has a disk initialization program on it. I do not know the difference between formatting and intializing, if there is one. All intialization completely erases the hard drive. You can designate however many partitions you wish to have in your disk format when you initialize.
Before I started using OSX:
All I did besides initial formatting is occassional repair of directory corruption, etc., and periodic optimizing of the hard drive. I used Norton DiskDoctor and SpeedDisk for this (both included in Norton Utilities). If damage was severe, reinitialization was necessary, and then my strict attention to backing up EVERYTHING always paid off.
Since using OSX:
I now have OS 10.3. I have never had a system meltdown. This is the most stable system I have ever used. I have not even purchased a disk utility other than what comes with the system. After years of occassional crashes on Mac operating systems 6-9, Mac OS10 has been like paradise. :-)