I am installing a new hard drive for a friend on her mac g3. using the panther OS. I am totally new to mac.
the new disk that we got does not contain any formatting software for the mac. just windows.
I have done this many times before on a PC, but never on a mac.
it is a seagate 200 gig drive, I went to there site to get a utility for formatting and it sends me back to apple's website. I have searched Apple's faq's and support and I can't find anything that will explain what needs to be done so the system will recognize the drive.
she is running her system on an external drive now. the original had failed.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

go to application/utilities and launch disk utility. in disk utility select the 200gb HD and then select erase, in the pull down menu select mac os extended and click erase.

let us know if it work.

thanks for replying, we will give it a shot and let you know.

I installed the same drive (Seagate 200) in a G4 running OS 10.2.8, and it will only format to 128 gig. Any clues?

actually we haven't had time to try the new drive yet. work has kept us busy. but i will let you know as soon as we do. if you find anything else out please let us know. thanks.

I did find the answer. I'm using a Tempo ATA 100 PCI card with the drives. It doesn't support drives larger than 137 gb. I'd either need to go to a ATA 133 card with firmware update, or an external IDE/Firewire case. I ordered an external case, but it hasn't arrived. Make sure you buy a case with a bridge that supports ATA-6 or newer. ATA-5 only goes up to 137 gb.

Hello,

I would format it into separate partitions for security and managability reasons. Unless you are doing digitial video recording, where you need such a large partition, break that large drive into a few partitions to keep it managable. Yes, there are going to be limits on how large an OS can format a device. There may be other limits on the physical number of files allowed on a drive (for example, can you fill all 128 MB of hard drive with thousands of thousands of 50K (or whatever the smallest cluster size) files?

Partitioning to managable sizes (50 - 100 GB each) protect from these problems. Sometime down the road, you might need to format that partition to fix a problem. If you have your whole drive as one big partition, you might not have anywhere else to go with the data!

If you think of a workstation as a small server, and get out of the One drive = one partition mentality, you will open a lot of doors for new solutions. Granted, partitioning will not save you from a hardware crash of the device, but many logical problems can be avoided.

Christian

I am also having problems with a seagate 200 GB external firewire. It loads fine onto the desktop, I erased it but the disk utility crashes everytime I try to partition the drive. (running OS 10.3) Any thoughts?

Hello,

Doing a search on Google Groups, it appears that a couple other people report problems with this drive on Windows XP systems. I took a look at seagates website, and could not find anything specific for the firewire model. You might want to go there... it does ask for a model number that I did not have. Maybe a hidden web page.

It might also be time to get on the phone, and call seagate and see what is up.

Christian