Mac OS® X Snow Leopard™ for Dummies®

Chapter 7. Dealing with Disks

In This Chapter

• Initializing and erasing your disks

• Using PC-formatted disks

• Creating your own CDs and DVDs

• Ejecting disks

In this chapter, I show you disk basics: how to format them for your Mac, how to format them so your Windows-using brethren (and sisteren) can use them, how to eject them, how to copy or move files between disks, and much more. Onward!

This chapter offers lots of info that applies to every Mac user — including folder management and moving or copying files to and from disks other than your internal hard drive. I also show you how to work with optical media such as CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, and DVD+R DL (dual-layer) — types of discs that many Mac users deal with regularly. You almost certainly have an internal SuperDrive (CD and DVD player/burner). Or you might have added external storage devices such as a USB flash drive, a USB or FireWire hard drive, or an optical disc player/recorder.

External drives may use magnetic "disks" or optical "discs" (the computer industry uses both spellings to mean "media used to store files;" see the accompanying sidebar). The bottom line is that they allow you to copy and move files easily so you can use them on other Macs or PCs.

Comprehending Disks

You should think of the disk icons that appear on the Desktop (and/or in the sidebars of Finder windows) as though they were folders. That's because your Mac sees disks as nothing but giant folders. When you double-click one, its contents appear ...