I e-mailed tech support for Anubis (a hard drive utility thing) about how I couldn't format my new ATA/IDE hard drive in a Firewire enclosure with their software. The guy said IDE drives could only be initialized, not formatted. Is this true? I've formatted several drives, including ATA drives, unless I was dreaming or something. Am I right or am I crazy?

I'm not completely sure about this, but I believe the formatting of the HD is called "initializing." I think in Disk Utility the button says "Initialize." I call it formatting, but I don't think it technically is. I could be wrong.

I know you can write zeros to your HD when you initialized. That erases everything by starting over.

I'm not even sure what the definition of "formatting" is.

Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about

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Try and format it using the regular Drive Setup and not throught their utility

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MacOS 9.1 drive setup doesn't recognize drives on the Firewire bus. I wouldn't have even installed that Anubis crap if I could use drive setup.

In the PC world, it's "formatting". In Drive Setup, they call it "initialing". Formatting basically just makes a FAT (file allocation table), so that the OS knows where it can write data to, and how it can find it again. Now, for Mac OS, you just replace "FAT" with whatever Apple uses (I'm not sure what it is). In the simplist sense, it's just like making a little map of the HD, saying where everything is, and blocking off barriers (bad sectors of the disk so they won't be used).
Another interesting thing, formattting really doesn't destroy your previous data. It just says that those areas are available to be written to. The same goes with deleting files. If you delete a file, it's location is lost, and made as 'available'. Unless you write zeros overtop to whipe it out, it's not really gone.
At least that's my interpritation of it all. Hopefully that makes it less confusing.

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Why 1984, won't be
like "1984"

formating- writing a specific type of directory to a disk for a specific OS. It writes the specific code necessary for the OS to use the disk. Mac is HFS (recently HFS+(hierarchial file system)), Windows is FAT (now FAT32), UNIX is ufs sometimes (universal file system) etc.

Initalizing- simply to wipe out everything on a disk so it can be formatted. everything is not actually gone, but the catalog telling the os where it all is, is gone. Don't even try to recover data from an initalization.

hope that helps you, if not too late.

I'm trying to format the hard drive I just bought. So basically just a simple initialization which doesn't take even 5 seconds will make it fully usable? I thought you should do a full format (but apparantely I cannot).

[Demonhood]

As far as I can remember, you never want to click on the ZERO ALL DATA checkbox when formatting a third party HD. I've read that it can cause some serious issues. And I don't mean psychological ones.

Zeroing all the data won't do anything harmful (that I know of). It will just write over anything that is on the disk. If you had confidential files on the disk, and you need them gone, zeroing the disk will overwrite everything. If you are initializing the drive for the first time, then it's not necessary.
BTW, Windows 98 accepts FAT32 (and possibly late released of Win95).
And HFS+ started with Mac OS 8.1, I believe. And HFS was for &gt; 8.


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Why 1984, won't be
like "1984"

Transferring this to peripherals.

And I'd suggest going with either Hard Disk Speed Tools or, second by a long shot, Hard Disk Toolkit.