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Mac

Time Machine External Drives

So I got a great deal on a Maxtor One Touch 4: 1TB for 140.  I am no math wiz but isn’t that like 14 cents per gig.  I have to say, it was a good deal.  I bought this drive to replace my previous time machine backup drive.  One big problem with this.  It came preformated with the wrong filesystem.  Well, I had the hardest time with Disk Utility to format the drive to the correct format.  I kept getting errors when I wanted to format it to HFS or really anything but MS-DOS.  So after much google-ing, I finally just decided to delve into the old command line and just get it done.  That’s the great thing about a MAC is when all esle fails.  The Unix background of a MAC just enables you to just get it done. I chose to use the diskutil and erase the disk and format it to the Journaled HFS+ format which is the prefered for Time Machine.
Here’s the command to type into the terminal window:
diskutil eraseDisk JournaledHFS+ WhateverYouWantToCallYourNewDrive disk1
This seemed to work relatively fast as well.

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