Formating an New Harddrive

Im in the middle of swapping out a WD Passport 320GB (an external Hard drive) to my MacBook. The External Drive is still in the external casing. I am in the process of formating the drive.


I have a question on formating the wd drive. I connected the drive via USB and went to format it before using Carbon Copy to clone it. I went into disc utility and saw the erase tab. Under there you can select the current internal Hd:

111.8 GB Fujitsu MHW2....
Macintosh HD

and you can see the WD Passport Drive:

298.1 GB WD 3200EBV E...
WD Passport

I can select both options ( the "298.1 GB WD 3200EBV E" and the "WD Passport") I tried to use the erase function in the "WD passport" to change it to Mac OS Extended Journal (HFS)...and all went well. The "WD Passport" shows as Mac OS Extended Journal. BUT when I select the "the 298.1 GB WD 3200EBV E" it still shows as MS-DOS (FAT). I thought ok...Ill just have to reformat that and I did...it renamed my "WD Passport" to Dsk something or another and its still a Mac OS Extended Journal. Again when I look at the 298.1 GB WD 3200EBV E..., it still shows as MS-DOS (FAT).

Is there anything I can do to get this going, I have hit a speed bump and I need some advise. The physical part of this is not going to be hard ( I have replaced HD's before...albeit in PC's...but hey Iam a newbie convert).

Sorry if this question is confusing.

I think that you may have succeeded even though you don't realize it. I am guessing that when you select "298.1 GB WD 3200EBV E" you see the MS-DOS note in the field called Partition Scheme, and that when you select "WD Passport", you see the Mac OS Extended Journal in the field called Format. If this is the case, you are OK. You have succeeded in formating your drive for Mac OS.

There are many partitioning schemas out there for hard drives. The most common one is the old MS-DOS/Windows primary/extended partition schema. This just defines the partitions on the drive, not the format that each partition is using.

I think what you have is a new drive that was pre-partitioned using the MS-DOS partition table approach. You then formatted the only partition for Mac OS Extended Journal. Hence, depending on which thing you look at, the disk or the partition, you see different things.

Now, the only question I would have for more expert readers than myself is whether Macs can boot off of disk with an MS-DOS style partition table, even though the main partition is Mac OS Extended Journal. I believe the answer is yes, but having not done this myself, it is worth asking.