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| Author | Formatting an external drive (Read 1056 times) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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wove
1024 MB  Posts: 1363 
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on: December 13, 2025, 20:51
I picked up a used external 500GB LaCie D2 Firewire drive. Of course I never had a drive this big when I was using System 7, 8 or 9 and for that matter it was probably El Capitan or so before I had anything with this much storage. I am looking to use it with both newer stuff (obviously not that new, since the devices I will use still have firewire ports) and older stuff. I have to do a format first before I can partition. Options are Master Boot Record, GUID, Apple Partition Map. Since the drive is to be used with Apple OSes, I am guessing Apple Partition Map is the way to go, but I would not mind confirmation on that selection. Since the drive will hopefully be used with System 7 as well as MacOS 8/9 and OS X I could really use some partition suggestions as well. Overall I have never liked partitions, so have never set any up before. |
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ShinobiKenobi
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256 MB Posts: 362 System 7 fan
Reply #1 on: December 14, 2025, 02:59
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Here are the details of my external firewire drive. It's called Mac OS X. http://revontulet.org/2025/12/14/e44acea45c6d4f068444ada8a241bf8d.jpg I don't know what partition table it's using, only the partition type. My Power Macintosh 7200/75 can see it and use it.
Last Edit: December 14, 2025, 03:02 by ShinobiKenobi
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wove
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1024 MB Posts: 1363
Reply #2 on: December 15, 2025, 17:31
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Thanks for the info @ShinobiKenobi. I got side tracked taking the drive apart as I am very prone to do. It is a glaring example of over engineering. The drive is in a huge cast aluminum casing with fins. Inside is a small circuit board about the side of an index card and a 3.5" 500GB Hitachi 7200RPM drive. The 3.5" drive is to be expected. I think a 7200RPM drive is overkill for an external drive using Firewire/USB. The drive is a removable SATA drive and if that is replaced with a 2.5" SATA drive the whole unit goes from being in a case the size of an old tray loading CD drive to something what fits in an old 8-track audio cassette. So now the guts are residing in an old small wooden cigar box. So now rather than worrying about formatting a huge drive, I can just reuse some older 2.5" SATA drives and put different OSes on different drives and swap them to change systems. The 3 pounds of superfluous aluminum can be recycled.
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lauland
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512 MB Posts: 674 Symtes 7 Mewconer!
Reply #3 on: December 15, 2025, 22:10
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If you are going to boot a Mac from it, it should (mostly) not be MBR. For PowerPC it must be Apple Partition Map. If MacOS 7-9, you must use a formater that installs the "drivers". For Intel, I've been able to boot off of all three. (Originally, Intel required GUID, very old firmware). If you aren't going to boot from it, it depends on the OS version. Classic ie 7-9 won't understand GUID (although maybe MBR "wrappper"?) Older MacOS X PPC won't understand it either (again...maybe?) Newer MacOS X or Intel should understand all three. (I think?) GUID will create a "fake MBR" that, usually, is read by older OS's, but I wouldn't trust it.
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wove
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1024 MB Posts: 1363
Reply #4 on: December 18, 2025, 02:41
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Thanks for the info. I will go with Apple Partition Map for the format. For me the big issue is; what do I want to do with it. currently my Mini runs Tiger with the Classic environment providing access to the applications from earlier days I still like to use. There is no good reason to change that setup. Currently my objective is to simply take a look at bygone MacOs releases. I assume I will need to format the drive using drive setup from an OS9 or earlier installer, since that will be necessary to get OS 9 drivers installed. OS X's Disk Utility will only offer to install OS 9 drivers if it is being ran on hardware that actually supports MacOS 9. I can easily get tripped up on silly nonsense. The smallest SATA drive I have is 60GB. System7.6.1 supports 2GB, and I am simply terrified of wasting 58GB of drive space. I do have 20 unused and old SATA drives, so worries about running out of drives is just silly. But then hey, are we all not constrained by working around our phobias. 
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ShinobiKenobi
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256 MB Posts: 362 System 7 fan
Reply #5 on: December 18, 2025, 10:08
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I'm using volumes (partitions) significantly larger on my 7200. It might be worth mentioning that, despite being designed for SCSI drives exclusively, I don't have any SCSI drives that work. I have a Sonnet Tempo Trio USB/Firewire/ATA, (two of each) card. The largest I've seen that it can recognize from the ATA interface of the card, is somewhere between 120 GB-130 something GB? The normal limit was 137, I think. But I don't think it was the same on my 7200. It's weird. I would check, but that computer is currently without a (working) monitor. However, I can access hundreds of gigabytes from an external Firewire drive. Forgot to add: all of the above was in 7.6.1.
Last Edit: December 18, 2025, 10:10 by ShinobiKenobi
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lauland
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512 MB Posts: 674 Symtes 7 Mewconer!
Reply #6 on: December 18, 2025, 15:35
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I believe I used Drive Setup (or whatever it is called) in 7.6 on my mini, but used it to create two partitions on the internal drive, and installed 7.6 on the first. I then rebooted into Tiger off a firewire drive, reformatted the second partition to HFS+ and restored Tiger to it, so I can dual boot either 7.6 or Tiger. Since you're talking about an external drive, you'd probably have trouble formatting it in 7.6, so OS9 would be the best way to go.
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