I am back at work after a long vacation, and one of the first things I started doing this year was to reinstall several of my computers. There is nothing like a fresh start once in a while, with the added benefits of some extra hard disk space (not reinstalling all those programs I never use anyway) and performance benefits (incredible how fast a newly installed computer boots up!). I have been testing Ubuntu on an Asus eee for a while, and have been impressed by how easy it was to install and use.

I bought a 1TB Western Digital hard drive the other day, and it came preformatted with FAT32. Since I will only be using this on OS X machines, I wanted to reformat it with HFS instead, but had problems doing this with Disk Utility. Then I came across a thread suggesting to change the partition type to GUID, and everything worked fine. This can be done in Disk Utility as the screenshot below show.