Formatting; Important Information If You Plan On Using Your Drive With A Pc System - OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro "Quad Interface" Owner's Manual

OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro "Quad Interface" Chapter 3 - Formatting

3 FORMATTING

3.1 IMPORTANT INFORMATION IF YOU PLAN ON USING YOUR DRIVE
TO BOOT ON A G3, G4, OR G5 SYSTEM
Your new external hard drive has been formatted for the Macintosh as a Mac OS X
Extended (Journaled) volume, using the GUID* Partition Table scheme. This means
that your new drive is ready to use immediately out of the box if you have an Intel
based Macintosh computer.
For your new OWC external hard drive to provide boot compatibility (meaning you
wish to run the operating system from the external drive) with Power-PC based
computers (G3, G4, G5) using Mac OS X, you will need to repartition/format the drive
and change the partition mapping from GUID to APM (Apple Partition Map**). If
you do not plan to use your new external drive as the start up drive, you do not need
to perform this procedure, your new drive will work as formatted for normal external
storage use and step by step instructions to do so are covered on the next pages of
this manual.
Notes:
*GPT (GUID Partition Table) - To use the disk as a boot volume on an Intel-based
Mac, or to use the disk as a non-boot disk with any Mac with Mac OS X version 10.4 or
later.
**APM (Apple Partition Map) - to use the disk as a boot volume on a Power-PC based
Mac, or to use the disk as a non-boot disk with any Mac. If you are using Mac OS X
10.3.9 or earlier, you must repartion and format the hard drive using this method.
Apple also has an article about repartitioning, available at:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1600
3.2 IMPORTANT INFORMATION IF YOU PLAN ON USING YOUR DRIVE
WITH A PC SYSTEM
Please turn to section 3.4 and proceed from there to reformat your drive to use with a
PC.