Dealing with Stubborn External USB HDs in OS X

Michael — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 23:48:46 +0000

If you’ve purchased (or have otherwise come into possession of) an external USB hard drive, and you’re having trouble getting Disk Utility to play nicely with it (i.e. reformat it to HFS+), here’s a trick for you. Open Terminal and type the following:

cd /dev/
ls - | grep disk

Take note of the disks displayed. Provided you have no other external hard drives attached, your culprit disk is probably going to be disk1.

Again in the terminal, execute the following:

diskutil eraseDisk HFS+ disk1

This invokes the Disk Utility, commands it to erase the disk disk1, rename it as and format the drive as HFS+, or MacOS Extended Volume Hard Drive Format.

Note: Use HFS+ if you intend to use the hard drive on Mac only. If you want to use it on PC or PC/Mac, you’re going to have to choose another option. For more detailed information, check out the Apple developers website.

Missing Podcasts on iPod

Michael — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 19:22:50 +0000

If you’ve recently purchased a new iPod and have transferred files from your old iPod to the new one, only to find that your podcasts are now “missing,” I may have good news for you. The same happened to me this morning, but I found that they were all still there… just hiding. Here’s how I fixed it:

If you try to search for the “podcast” genre or even the specific title of the podcast/episode, it won’t show up. However, if you make a smart playlist based on the genre “podcast,” everything should show up there. Once you’ve done that, select all files in that smartlist, right (ctrl) click on the selected files, and click on “get info.” From there, go to Options, and change the Media type to music. Your podcasts should now show up in your Music folder.

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Dealing with Stubborn External USB HDs in OS X

Missing Podcasts on iPod