Mac OS® X 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, how to format them so that 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) — all of which many Mac users deal with regularly. If you have a recently minted Mac, for example, you probably have an internal SuperDrive (CD and DVD player/burner). Or you might have added an external USB flash drive or optical disc player/recorder.

The bottom line is that external disk or disc drives allow you to easily copy files for friends, regardless of whether they use a Mac or a PC, and to move your files between home and work.

Is that a disk or a disc?

So how do you spell this critter, anyway? Sometimes you see it spelled d‐i‐s‐k; other times you see it spelled d‐i‐s‐c. If you're wondering what's up with that, here's the skinny. In the good old days, the only kind of computer disk was a disk with a k: floppy disk, hard drive, Bernoulli disk, and so on. Then one day, the compact disc (you know, a CD) was invented. ...