Initialize hardrive on Snow Leopard

**Eleeazar** · 22-01-2010

Hi,
I have a old computer which was working on MAC. Now I had decided to upgrade it. I had adds some RAM stick and additional hard drive to it.Here I am confuse with the new hard disk. It has a single partition. Is there a need of many partitions. What does initializing a partition means in MAC. This means simply to format and install new software's in it.

**Solomon** · 22-01-2010

Initialize simply means to clean up your entire hard drive content and then setup a new one. That means formatting in windows. That can be done via mac bootable disc but a backup is recommended for the same on a cd or usb if you want to your data back. Otherwise you can just use a external drive for the same.

**MrChris-** · 22-01-2010

Format is a process in which you will give this drive a format. You can choose between several formats. I suggest you format Mac OS Extended or Mac OS Extended Journal. SNOW LEOPARD also supports formatting Sensitive (Journaled or not). This option allows including Spotlight to distinguish between uppercase and lowercase letters, and so the system does not treat similarly the data or commands as they are entered in uppercase or lowercase.

**Calvin K** · 22-01-2010

Partition means that you will carve your hard disk into several independent pieces. So if you partition your hard drive 1TB in 2 partitions of 500GB, it's as if you had, somehow, 2 hard drives of 500 GB! And instead of seeing a hard drive icon on your desktop, you will have 2!. You can of course adjust the size of your partitions according to their destinations.

**Lillebror** · 22-01-2010

The advantages of partitioning is firstly, it allows you for example to install OS X on a partition and you do such a partition for storage of files, video files, personal files and then why not make another partition for your work encoding video. Another advantage for example if you ever need to reinstall OS X, you will not be forced to delete your entire hard drive: You will just simply cleaning the single partition OS X.

**jesse** · 22-01-2010

The best part of partitioning a hard drive refers to that if your operating system lies on a single drive and the data on other then it is quiet safe to recover it. Like in Windows my c drive has crashed before. Due to that I had run a recovery manage which came with my operating system. The recovery manager has reinstalled windows but removed all my data. So always try to keep more than one partition on your desktop.