Glyph Hard Drive Set-up on Windows: a Tech Tip from Videoguys.com

We just grabbed a new Glyph Atom SSD drive to use in house and when we connected it to our Windows machine we learned that the Atom drives are pre-formatted out of the box for Mac and that you have to do a little work to get them up and running on a Windows PC. This is common practice in the industry since these nice looking Atom drives match the color schemes of the new MacBooks I guess it makes sense. Fortunately, reformatting on the PC is super easy when you follow these simple steps from Glyph. Click here to download these instructions in a PDF Document: How to Reformat Your Glyph to Be Used on Windows

How to Format Your Glyph to Be Used on Windows

Cleaning the Hard Disk in Command Prompt: Before trying this please be aware that this process erases what is on your Glyph. If applicable, back the data up onto another drive. Please try the following to clean your disk:

1. Have your Glyph be the only device connected to the computer during this process
2. Click on the Start Button and type in "cmd" (without quotes)
3. Right click the cmd.exe that appears in the search results and click "run as administrator". The command prompt screen will appear.
4. Type "diskpart" (without quotes and without spaces) and hit enter. The command prompt should change to "DISKPART>", then type "list disk" (without quotes) and hit enter. The command prompt screen will then list the Disks that the computer sees. Disk 0 is usually the internal drive of the computer. If the Glyph is the only device connected to the computer it will usually be shown as Disk 1 but that can vary. If you have multiple disks it is easy to unplug the Glyph drive run the list again, then plug it back in and run the list and the new drive should help you find it.
5. In order to select the Glyph drive type "select disk #" (without quotes and replace the # sign with the number of the Glyph drive) and hit enter. The command prompt will then display "Disk # is now the selected disk."
6. Type "clean" (without quotes) and hit enter. The command prompt will then display "Diskpart succeeded in cleaning the disk."Please now close the command prompt and continue on to the next set of directions - - -

Now to Format the Disk in Disk Management:

1. Access Disk Management- For Windows 7: Open the Start Menu, Right click on Computer, Click on Manage. The Computer Management Screen will then come up Under Storage (on the left towards the bottom) there will be Disk Management, click on Disk ManagementFor Windows 8, 8.1, and 10: Right click on the Start Icon, Click on Disk Management. The Disk Management Window will then come up.
2. When entering Disk Management it will prompt you to Initialize The Disk, please select GPT and click “Next”
3. In Disk Management it will show the disk that was cleaned as Unallocated and have a black stripe all across the top of the visual representation of the partition.
4. Right click on the area that has the black strip across the top and click "New Simple Volume"
5. New Simple Volume Wizard will then appear click "Next".
6. The next step will be to Specify Volume Size that will show the maximum and minimum disk space, click "Next"
7. Following that step the next would be to Assign Drive Letter or Path, I recommend picking a letter that is on the lower end of the alphabet (i.e. R, S, T, U, V. etc) and then click “Next”
8. You will now be able to format the disk in the New Simple Volume Wizard. Leave the "Format this volume with the following settings" selected and the "File System" as NTFS. Using the "Volume Label" you may name the disk whatever you wish. **Please make sure to have PREFORM A QUICK FORMAT selected**. Click "Next".
9. The New Simple Volume Wizard will then display that it is Completed. Click "Finish" to close the Wizard.
10. In Disk Management you will see that the visual representation of the disk's partition now has a blue stripe over the top of the partition. The disk is now formatted and ready to use!!