Posted on November 1, 2009 at 9:44 am

My hardrive keeps bugging out!

Does your computer constantly fail at copping large files to your new hardrive that you bought. Well, that’s supposed to happen. YAY! right…

THE PROBLEM: Most hardrives are formated fat32 or fat16, both of these formats have a limitation. The issue is that each of these formats cannot hold files over 2gb. If the file that you NEED to copy over is greater than 2gb, then it WILL NOT COPY OVER.

WARNING: Backup the contents of the drive, because both methods will ERASE EVERYTHING ON THE DRIVE.

SOLUTION 1 (the mac way): You can use this meathod if and only if you ONLY WISH TO USE THE HARDRIVE ON APPLE COMPUTERS (not PCs)

Step 1) Unplug all other drives from computer, leave only THE drive that you are trying to fix.

Step 2) Open Finder, and go to /Applications/Utillities/

Step 3) Open the application DiskUtillity.app

Step 4) Find your hardrive in the list at the left of the window.

Step 5) Click on the hardrive, not the name of the HD but the thing above it, it brobably says something stupid like “500 GB WD MyBook”. But it could be anything.

Step 6) Check the bottom to make sure it is the wright size, don’t want to partition the wrong drive. (even thoug you unplugged them all.)

Step 7) Look at the tabs near the top of the window, one should say either “Partitions” or “Partition Editor” or “Partition” (depending on your version of MAC OSX)

Step 8) Where it says current, click and change to “1 Partition”.

Step 9) Hit options, and change the drive from “Master Boot Reccord” to “Apple Partition Map”

Step 10) Make sure that the drive’s partition type is “Mac OSX Extended Journaled”

Step 11) Click the “apply” button and wait.

SOLUTION 2: The PC Method, requires access to a pc.

Step 1) Plug drive into a PC

Step 2) Click on “My Computer” from the start menu.

Step 3) Find the drive, right click on it and click on “Format…”

Step 4) Change Fat32 or Fat16 to NTFS.

Step 5) Hit ENTER and wait.

Step 6) To write to this drive on a Mac, you will need NTFS-3G If this driver becomes unavailable, I will build it myself.

That’s it, now you can copy large files to your drive!

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