AboutDavid Anders Expertise Seattle - The Computer Guy - 15 yr veteran Mac/PC/network problem solving. Clients are design firms, artists, freelancers and photographers.
PLEASE PLEASE provide EXACT info for Mac Model and OS Version.
RAM installed - added cards - external devices - recent changes.
Do you do MONTHLY MAINTENANCE? With what Utility?
What you have tried and what result do you want.
Experience First computer experience 1969. Worked in 3 computer stores. Setup First Mac and First IBM-PC.
Expert: David Anders Date: 6/8/2008 Subject: Initializing new Hard Disk
Question I have been googling to no avail and would greatly appreciate your help. I am a photographer and I have filled up my hard disk with photos as you can see with the following info:
Macintosh HD:
Capacity: 232.57 GB
Available: 5.73 GB
Writable: Yes
File System: Journaled HFS+
BSD Name: disk1s2
Mount Point: /
The first time this happened to me I deleted a bunch of old pictures and thought I needed more memory so I bought more RAM. I have since realized that what I really need is more hard disk space to store the pics on. I purchased a 750 GB hard disk from the apple store tonight and they installed it at the store. I got home and plugged the computer back in and the red stop sign came up saying it did not recognize a disk and gave me the option to initialize--when I click on intialize it brings up disk utility and shows me my drives, but when I click on the 750 GB drive all the boxes are greyed out and I can do anything.
Hardware Overview:
Model Name: Mac Pro
Model Identifier: MacPro1,1
Processor Name: Dual-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed: 2.66 GHz
Number Of Processors: 2
Total Number Of Cores: 4
L2 Cache (per processor): 4 MB
Memory: 2 GB
Bus Speed: 1.33 GHz
Boot ROM Version: MP11.005C.B08
SMC Version: 1.7f10
Serial Number:
I purchased in 2006 I have Mac osx v 10.4.11 (but my startup disk is v 10.4.7)
I have no idea what monthly maintenance would be so I obviously don't do that. :)
I would like to be able to have my computer run as fast as it can as it is very slow right now in cs3. i save alot of .psd and raw files. I would like to now how to set up my new hard disk so that I can be more efficient. Sorry for the long email. Your help is greatly appreciated!
Answer To get the added drive to format.
Does it appear on the desktop?
Does it appear in Disk Utility (yes, but no options available)
Does it appear in the System Profiler?
It MAY be that a system process is preventing partitioning or formatting.
Start with SHIFT key down at startup (Safe Boot Mode)
Test and see if you can partition and format in Disk Utility.
Start from your OSX install DVD and open Disk Utility and test...
IF not download AppleJack, install it and run it. (run monthly) http://applejack.sourceforge.net/
Test and see if you can partition and format in Disk Utility.
IF you can, I would create a partition for Photoshop to use as a Scratch Disk (4 times the size of the maximum number of photos you have open at one time - 3 photos 100Mb = 4x3x100=1200MB PLUS 1 times the maximum number of layers you have open on each image)
Another partition for a SuperDuper Backup of your Boot Disk for saving your operating system (100Gb or so) and another partition for storing your files.
It is POSSIBLE the drive is defective OR a Western Digital model that has a firmware bug that has problems.
