LaCie Hard Disk •
Design by neiL pouLton
user Manual
Formatting and partitioning
Page 1
What is Formatting?
When a disk is formatted, the following things oc-
cur: the operating system erases all of the bookkeeping
information on the disk, tests the disk to make sure
that all of the sectors are reliable, marks bad sectors
(i.e., those that are scratched) and creates internal ad-
dress tables that it later uses to locate information. Your
LaCie Hard Disk is preformatted in FAT 32 (MS-
DOS) format. To reformat your drive, follow the in-
structions in this section.
What is Partitioning?
You can also divide the hard disk into sections, called
partitions. A partition is a section of the hard disk’s stor-
age capacity that is created to contain files and data. For
instance, you could create three partitions on your drive:
one partition for your office documents, one as a back-
up and one for your multimedia files. Or, if you will be
sharing the drive with another person in your household
or office, you can create a partition for each person who
uses the drive. Partitioning is optional.
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The first time you use your LaCie Hard Disk, the
LaCie Setup Assistant formats your drive according to
your needs. If your needs change, you can reformat your
LaCie Hard Disk to optimize it for use with Windows
or Mac, or for cross-platform use. For example, if you
used LaCie Setup Assistant to format your drive to
work with your Mac, but now you want to share your
hard disk with Windows users, you can reformat it to
FAT 32 (MS-DOS) for this purpose.
ImpOrTANT INfO:
Please copy the User
Manual and utilities to your computer before
reformatting. Reformatting will erase everything
from the hard disk. If you have other data that you
want to protect or continue to use, copy this infor-
mation to your computer before reformatting.
3. Optional Formatting and Partitioning
Use NTFS if...
...you will be using the drive only with Windows
2000, Windows XP or Windows Vista (perfor-
mance will generally be greater when compared
to FAT 32). This file system is compatible in read
only mode with Mac OS 10.3 and higher.
Use HFS+ if...
...you will be using the drive on Macs only; perfor-
mance will generally be greater when compared to
FAT 32. This file system is NOT compatible with
Windows OS.
Use FAT 32 (MS-DOS) if...
...you will be using your drive with both Windows
and Mac 10.3 or sharing the drive between Win-
dows 2000 and Windows XP or Windows Vista.
Maximum single file size is 4GB.
File System Formats
There are three different file system format catego-
ries: NTFS, FAT 32 (MS-DOS), and Mac OS Extend-
ed (HFS+). See the table, below, for more information.
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