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Format a NTFS hard drive in 10.3 - NOT
Authored by: macslut on Apr 22, '05 10:15:03PM

-- Arbitrary; the hint is completely unrelated to which format the poster needed the drive in, all the matters is that the format itself was unavailable.

You mean that "the ability to format" was unavailable, yes? The author never discusses if the NTFS format is available or not as an option. Apparently the author either didn't know or care what the drive was formatted as when he put it back in the PC. You and I both know that the format NTFS was not available as an option, but someone coming to this hint with know prior knowledge of this, and seeing that he ended up putting the drive back in the PC, has no way of knowing that the ability to format as NTFS is not an option.

-- But if I wanted to find out how to format an NTFS drive into, as an example, unpartitioned space, wouldn't I still search for "10.3", "format" and "NTFS"?

Sure, and ideally see an article with the title "How to reformat an NTFS hard drive" or some of the other examples others have posted.

-- That is a rediculous comment, have you actually tried out what you say? If you go to Disk Utility it will show the erase option as being available in most situations whether you choose the disk or the partition unless the drive is the currently active boot drive. What the author says is that a mounted NTFS drive can not be erased until it is unmounted but non-boot HFS/+ drives certainly can be.

There are far more formats than NTFS/HFS/HFS Extended, and all kinds of partition combinations. The issue is the inability to erase a volume using Disk Utility that is in a format that Disk Utility itself can not create, unless you reformat the drive. It is at this point that you are limited to what Disk Utility can format a drive as (namely HFS, HFS Extended, FAT32 and UNIX).

-- The only problem with that statement is that the author didn't say "please get me a" and the sentance "format a NTFS..." is completely different.

You're quoting me out of context. The sentence "Format a NTFS..." is much closer to "Please get me a..." than it is to "Please get me the..." which is the point I was making as a response to the post where "Please get me the..." was used as an example.

I'm not *trying* to be pedantic here (honest, I'm not), I'm just pointing out what others have since reiterated, and that is the title of this hint is misleading.



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