Does a new hard disk have to be formatted to be recognised

[pctech]

Colleague is trying to replace his Mac hard disk (A Hitachi SATA unit) with a Samsung one but cant get OSX installer to recognise it.

Does it need to be formatted first?

[Steve]

He needs to run disk utility which is available with the installer , name,partition if required and format. I think the format is a GUID partition table for an intel mac - Mac OS extended format (journaled) from memory but may be incorrect.

If disk utility cannot mount it there's a hardware problem.

[pctech]

Cheers Steve

[Steve]

The format type is correct for an intel Mac. Power Macs use the Apple partition table.

[Technical Ben]

Thought it might be that. Not sure if MAC have changed now, but there use to be the NTFS/FAT32 divide between the newer windows formatted drives and the older Mac ones.
Some disks come FAT32 formatted just in case (where Windows installations will reformat) but some come as NTFS, so MACs need to format instead.