The process of formatting and/or partitioning a hard drive is exactly the same for both Tiger and Leopard. If your new hard drive is FireWire and you intend to use it with both Macs and PCs, then leave it as is and do not reformat. whether you intend to partition your hard drive or not, you really should reformat your new hard drive for the Mac. Capturing clips longer than 9 minutes could result in the captured clip being broken into separate files. 2 gigs is good for about 9 minutes of DV capture.
Using the drive for FCP (and encoded files for DVD SP) could cause problems. It is possible that your new cross platform hard drive could have a 2 gig file size limit. This is true, but because the drive is formatted for cross platform compatibility, some stability and facility issues could arise. When you purchase a new hard drive for your Mac, either SATA/ATA (internal) or FireWire (external) the box that the drive comes in will likely tell you that the drive will run on both Macs and PCs. With FireWire external hard drives reaching one Terabyte in size, partitioning the drive can make project and file management much more manageable. I typically partition into two volumes, one for FCP Captured media, the second for DVD SP projects, for Builds and MPEG 2 encoded files. Partitioning can be used for organization purposes, i.e., each volume could be used as a media (scratch) drive, each for a different FCP Project. With hard drives getting bigger there are reasons why you might want to partition a hard drive. You can create up to 16 different partitions on a hard drive, each one can be of different size and format, even including the 'MS-DOS' format for use with PCs on a network. Partitioning a hard drive is the process of dividing a hard drive into separate, discrete sections, called 'volumes'. If you at step 3 above you get an error message saying "A GUID Partitioning Table (GPT) partitioning scheme is required.", please go to this Knowledge Base article for a resolution.Formatting & Partitioning a Hard Drive in OS Xįormatting & Partitioning a Hard Drive in OS X - Tiger and Leopard
If you would like to skip this step when accessing this disk on your primary Mac, you can choose to select the checkbox to Remember this password in my keychain. Once encrypted, when you next plug your external drive in, you will be prompted to enter the password you created earlier and click Unlock in order to unlock the disk.The best way to tell that the encryption is taking place is to watch the activity indicator light for your disk, if it has one, and if it is blinking do not disconnect it as the encryption process is likely still in progress. Result: The external disk will begin to encrypt, however, there is no progress bar to show you the process of the encryption, which could take as few as a couple of minutes up to several hours for large disks. When prompted to create an encryption password, use a strong password and enter it twice, along with a password hint, and click Encrypt Disk.Right-click (or two-finger click, or control-click) on this disk in order to bring up a contextual menu, and then select Encrypt " External Drive Name ".Open a new Finder window and select the external drive you would like to encrypt from the panel on the left, under Devices.Use the following steps in OS X Mountain Lion (10.8) and up to encrypt (and decrypt) external disks, including flash drives, from the Finder. Enable FileVault on External Disks in OS X 10.8 and Up