Initializing and formatting a hard drive will erase *all* information on that drive. If you are trying to access existing data or attempting data recovery on your hard drive and are encountering issues, please see this post here.īefore we get started, a brief word of caution is essential. We’ll be using a 4TB hard drive as our example. They also apply to new hard disks that are installed inside your computer and potentially other docking stations/enclosures/adapters. The following steps apply to our USBC-SATA-V, USB3-SATA-UASP1, USB3-SATA-U3, and our entire Plugable Storage System lineup.
We’ll cover the most common scenarios we run into, starting with Windows and finishing with Mac OS X instructions. Initializing prepares the drive to be used by the computer, partitioning sets aside specific areas of the disk for data, and formatting sets up the framework the computer uses to store that data.
