Newer Technology miniStack v3, User Manual

2.1 IMPORTANT INFORMATION IF YOU PLAN ON USING YOUR DRIVE 

TO BOOT ON A G3, G4, OR G5 SYSTEM

If you purchased a preconfigured Newer Technology MiniStack v3, your new external 

hard drive has been formatted for the Macintosh as a Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) 

volume, using the GUID* Partition Table scheme. This means that your new drive 

is ready to use immediately out of the box if you have an Intel based Macintosh 

computer.

For your new OWC external hard drive to provide boot compatibility (meaning you 

wish to run the operating system from the external drive) with Power-PC based 

computers (G3, G4, G5) using Mac OS X, you will need to repartition/format the drive 

and change the partition mapping from GUID to APM (Apple Partition Map**). If 

you do not plan to use your new external drive as the start up drive, you do not need 

to perform this procedure, your new drive will work as formatted for normal external 

storage use and step by step instructions to do so are covered on the next pages of 

this manual.

Notes:

 *GPT (GUID Partition Table) - To use the disk as a boot volume on an Intel-based 

Mac, or to use the disk as a non-boot disk with any Mac with Mac OS X version 10.4 or 

later.

**APM (Apple Partition Map) - to use the disk as a boot volume on a Power-PC based 

Mac, or to use the disk as a non-boot disk with any Mac. If you are using Mac OS X 

10.3.9 or earlier, you must repartion and format the hard drive using this method.

Apple also has an article about repartitioning, available at: 

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1600

2.2 IMPORTANT INFORMATION IF YOU PLAN ON USING YOUR DRIVE 

WITH A PC SYSTEM

Please turn to section 2.4 and proceed from there to reformat your drive to use with a 

PC.

Chapter 2 - Formatting

Newer Technology miniStack v3

2 FORMATTING