[kenty]

I want to get a second hard drive, but last time I had 2 drives with several partitions I reformatted the wrong partition and lost alot of important stuff.... Is there any way to lock your disk drives to make it harder to wipe the wrong one ?

Also, how big do serial ATA hard drives go up to ? 250 gig seems to be the limit at the local store...

[gorickey]

250 GB is the largest that I know of at retail...

And for intializing the wrong drive, the only advice I can offer is to be extremely careful and use common sense. You are prompted and physically have to make a few choices before a drive is erased in Disk Utility...double check and verify before you allow that to happen and you'll be fine...

[SSharon]

give your partitions unique and descriptive names so you don't mix them up.

looking at pricewatch.com I also see 300gb and 320gb drives listed.

[CharlesS]

A trick I use, now that Disk Copy doesn't exist anymore, is to erase CD-RW's using this Terminal command:

hdiutil burn -erase

This lets you erase CD-RW's without opening Disk Utility.