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Pompeyboy · Jun 1, 2009, 04:11 AM

Please Help,

I have just purchased a 320Gb internal HD for my white macbook as the current 160gb is nearly full, have gone through all the motions but when i boot from the start uyp disk cannot access the drive, its name appears on the left hand side list of Disk utilities but now option to verify or do anything else, so cant copy anything from my external time machine, as there is nowhere for it to go.
the drive was new and is a - Seagate OEM ST9320421AS,320GB SATA,MOMENTUS 7200.3 ,7200RPM 16MB Cache,Notebook Drive.

i have brought an ice case in the hope i may be able to set this up externally.

Spheric Harlot · Jun 1, 2009, 04:15 AM

The drive is unformatted when you buy it.

You must set it up as a Mac volume.

In Disk Utility, if you don't actually click on the drive at the left, the pane on the right tells you to "Select a disk, volume, or image".

If you actually do that (by simply clicking on the drive), you WILL get the options "First Aid", "Erase", "Partition", "RAID", and "Restore".

Choose "Erase" and create a Journaled Mac OS Extended volume.

Pompeyboy · Jun 1, 2009, 06:59 AM

Thanks,
but I am still a little confused,
the only thing i can seem to see in relation to the new drive is the wording of it on the left hand column, there is no drive recognised and present that I am able to click on elsewhere within this utilities set up. it shows my ext drive when plugged in, will I still be able to format the new hard drive even though it is not showing up where you mention?

Big Mac · Jun 1, 2009, 08:00 AM

If the drive doesn't appear at all on the left side, it isn't functional. You could have a loose cable (which is the most likely cause of a drive not appearing), or the drive may be broken.

P · Jun 1, 2009, 08:56 AM

Take a screenshot of what you see in Disk Utility and post it here.

Spheric Harlot · Jun 1, 2009, 02:49 PM

Originally Posted by Pompeyboy

the only thing i can seem to see in relation to the new drive is the wording of it on the left hand column

So "the wording of it" means that there's a little drive icon that's labelled "SEAGATE ST9320421AS" or somesuch?

Click on that.

Pompeyboy · Jun 3, 2009, 03:53 PM

Thanks for your help guys, took the drive out re inserted and then carried out as described in Spheric Harlot's email above, all now installed and working fine, even managed to back up with time machine so good as it was before, only now have twice the disk space.