Day: January 26, 2008

Memories: Apple ATG Summer Picnic, 1997

/ Adam Nash

Thursday night, Carolyn & I went out with a number of close friends to celebrate her birthday.  Eric Cheng brought a very nice little present for us – a snapshot from the Apple Advanced Technology Group (ATG) Summer Picnic in 1997.

This snapshot is now the earliest known couple photo Carolyn & I have.  Friday, August 22, 1997.  At this point, we had been dating all of 12 days.

This is also, I believe, the very last Apple ATG Picnic, since this is also the year that Steve returned to Apple and officially disbanded ATG.

So a little nostalgia on the blog tonight.  Big thanks to Eric for the great picture.

The Secret to Reformatting a Western Digital WD 1TB My Book External Hard Drive

/ Adam Nash / 50 Comments

Little tidbit.

When you buy a Western Digital (WD) 1 TB My Book External Hard Drive, they usually come formatted for Windows using FAT32. Of course, if you are using it with a Mac, then you’ll want to reformat it using Mac OS Extended (HFS+).

The problem: When you try to reformat in Disk Utility, you’ll get a very cryptic error that says that there was an unknown error with the partition map.

The solution: If you go to the partition map and click the “Options…” button, you’ll be able to select which scheme to use for the boot records. It turns out, if the boot record scheme is set to “Master Boot Record”, you will not be able to format it as Mac OS Extended. Flipping it to GUID or Apple Partition Map will work.

Once you get to that magic dialog, it’s pretty clear what to do. Why Apple doesn’t communicate this error intelligibly when you attempt to format I don’t know.

In any case, there is an Apple Discussion Board thread that saved the day for me. I’m posting it here just in case it saves the day for someone else.

I’m now ready to try out Apple Time Machine for the first time…

Update (12/29/2008): It’s amazing, but this continues to be one of the most popular posts on this blog.  Everyone seems to have this problem.  Interestingly, it’s not unique to Western Digital drives.  I find that I need to do this with Maxtor and Seagate Free Agent drives also.  I just did this with the new Seagate FreeAgent 1.5 TB external.  Works like a charm…