Quick Solution: Use Disk Utility to Restore your old drive to your new drive, then tell Time Machine that you want to use a different disk

The Whole Story

When I got the 1TB drive, it was formatted as FAT32. I had been using Time Machine (I am running Mac OS 10.5.2) and I wanted to use my new drive for Time Machine, but I wanted to keep my current Time Machine history. My vision was to have the exact same data, but now my external drive can hold more. I ran into a few issues while trying to do this, so here is how I solved them.

Note: The sections “Formatting the new hard drive”, “Transfer the files”, and “Transfer Problems” narrate the problems I had while trying to just copy files… see the following section, “Use Disk Utility Instead”, for enumerated instructions on how I actually solved the problem.

Formatting the new hard drive

When I first plugged in the drive, Leopard recognized it. I thought that I might just be able to dump the files from my old external hard drive (formatted in HFS+) onto the new one (FAT32). When I selected the files to move and dragged them to the new folder, I heard the “pang” sound that Finder makes when you copy files, but nothing actually happened.

Since I will only use this new drive on a Mac, I thought maybe I should reformat to HFS+ (I also thought that Time Machine might require it). Using Disk Utility, I ran into a few vague errors and the disk would never be successfully formatted. I found the solution on the Apple Discussion Forums .

This basically says that you must select the highest parent of the drive you want to format

and select the “Partition” page.

Then go to “Options…” and select the top option: “GUID”.

The formatting should only take a few seconds.

The next page goes over transferring your files.