I recently picked up a 1TB external drive for a very reasonable £74.95 from Amazon.co.uk. It came pre-formatted as FAT32 which was fine as I was going to use it primarily for my Windows XP installation via VMWare. Eventually I was going to partition it off to use some of the space for Mac storage.
Now that I have this new Mac which came with a 640GB HD I moved the VMware files onto the internal drive for speed and then wanted to format the 1TB drive for Mac OS (HFS).
I hit a minor snag as I couldn’t seem to format the drive due to an error: “Partition size not a multiple of 4k”. A moment with Google provided the answer which I’ve repeated here for anyone else that comes across this problem.
- Launch Disk Utility (It’s in Applications/Utilities but you knew that)
- Select the drive you wish to format and click on the “Partition Tab”
- Unless you actually want to partition the drive, select “1 Partition”
- Click the “Options” button and select “GUID Partition Table Scheme”
- Click on “Erase” and you’re done.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for the simple info re the Toshiba drive. I had run into the same problem. Cheers.
Greetings from America! You saved my life with that little hint.
Cheers.
Hallo Matt!
Thank´s a lot for your help. Didn´t change to GUID Partition! Now it works. Wich you all the best and greetings from Germany!
You can use PC/WinXP to format 1TB Toshiba USB HD for mac to be used with PC. You need to remove GPT Protective Partition first then use disk management to format it and assign a drive letter
Thanks for these excellent simple instructions! Worked perfectly.