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.
{ 3 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!