A little help here with an external hard drive.

[zeropur]

Hi there, how is everyone today?

So. I bought an external hard drive last week so I could start backing up my info.

Unfortunatly I had to back up a friends Tiger, so used CCC (or Carbon Copy Cloner) and therefor lost all my info that I had saved from Time Machine.

Now, that's just background info... my problem is the following.

My 500GB external hard drive is now only 390GB free... the rest being taken up by my friends info.

I no longer need this info, and wish to wipe completely the hard drive, and start again with 500GB and turn my time machine back on.

Which is the best way to go about it? Should I just hit Disk Utility and Erase? I thought that KEPt the info, and just deleted the access to the files. Also I have heard a few horror stories when, after the erase, their macs no longer recognize the hard drives.

I repeat, I want to wipe this thing completely, I no longer need the info on there.

Ok, now hit me with your knowledge.

[divigation]

Hitting Erase in Disk Utility does not erase anything, it removes access to that information. I have wiped out a great deal of data this way and never had an issue. If you erase the drive with Disk Utility I cannot imagine how the Mac would no longer be able to recognize the drive at all, if you reformat it improperly, then you can create a drive the Mac can't read or write to, but not one that is unrecognizable. If you are looking for a true erase then select Security Options on the Erase tab in DU and choose Zero Out. This will actually remove all data on the drive. It is a security option because generally it won't make the disk any more or less likely to have issues. Erasing the drive the traditional way is no different than zeroing out the data as far as the computer is concerned; writing your TM backup to a zeroed sector is no different than writing to a sector that has information written to it that has been made invisible by DU. Zeroing out data, whether once or 35 times, simply removes the ability to recover that data. So this is a long winded way of saying that I always just erase in DU and have never had issues with drives from 40GB up to 1TB. When I sell machines I do multi-pass zeroing of them for security, but never bother to truly erase if I just need to reclaim space.

[zeropur]

Originally Posted by divigation

Hitting Erase in Disk Utility does not erase anything, it removes access to that information. I have wiped out a great deal of data this way and never had an issue. If you erase the drive with Disk Utility I cannot imagine how the Mac would no longer be able to recognize the drive at all, if you reformat it improperly, then you can create a drive the Mac can't read or write to, but not one that is unrecognizable. If you are looking for a true erase then select Security Options on the Erase tab in DU and choose Zero Out. This will actually remove all data on the drive. It is a security option because generally it won't make the disk any more or less likely to have issues. Erasing the drive the traditional way is no different than zeroing out the data as far as the computer is concerned; writing your TM backup to a zeroed sector is no different than writing to a sector that has information written to it that has been made invisible by DU. Zeroing out data, whether once or 35 times, simply removes the ability to recover that data. So this is a long winded way of saying that I always just erase in DU and have never had issues with drives from 40GB up to 1TB. When I sell machines I do multi-pass zeroing of them for security, but never bother to truly erase if I just need to reclaim space.

Ok, but the data is not really the issue.

I just want to recover the 100 and odd gigs of disk space.

If I simply choose ZERO OUT in dsk utility. Will I have my hard drive showing 500Gigs free?

[divigation]

Just hitting Erase will free up the full 500 for TM to use. Zeroing out will actually erase the full 500. Both will generate the same result of full access to your whole drive and no more access to your friends data.

[zeropur]

Originally Posted by divigation

Just hitting Erase will free up the full 500 for TM to use. Zeroing out will actually erase the full 500. Both will generate the same result of full access to your whole drive and no more access to your friends data.

You da man!

[houltmac]

My personal choice is always to re-partition. I have never had a re-partition action go wrong on a drive that wasn't 10 seconds from death anyway. This will re-create the partition map which may remove potential issues you couldn't solve without DiskWarrior, will allow you to check the drive partition is the format you want, and will allow you to name the partition all in one go.