Format or erase P2 card on Mac?

[jen_luk]

Is there a way to format P2 cards on a Mac?

I have a MacBook Pro with the DuelAdapter, and have been offloading files from P2 cards onto two external firewire hard drives during shoots. As other folks have mentioned both on and off DVXuser, it can take some work to erase all of the contents of the card after copying the footage off of it. To get the LAST CLIP.TXT file to go away, I had to just go to the command line and do sudo rm, which finally removed everything off the card, but when I put the P2 card back into the HVX200, it said that the card was not formatted properly and I had to format it in the camcorder.

I am a bit wary of using P2 Genie given the glitches that Mac users have mentioned.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thank you.

[mrWr0ng]

are you emptying the trash after you delete everything?

normally I cmd+i on lastclip.txt, unlock it, delete both and empty the trash, goes back in the camera and shows up empty & ready for recording.

[jen_luk]

Yeah I just tried that and I still get "FORMAT ERR!" when I put the card in the camera.

I had read here that this method might be an issue
http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/tv_pilot_hvx_200_brockett.html
(near the bottom in the "Verify" section)

Any other methods?

Thank you.

[Bob Fagan]

I have done the delete on the Mac method with no problem....can't say how many I've done this way, but more than 50 and less than a hundred. Although I have not done this, I'm thinking you could use Disk Utility and erase the P2 that way and avoid the whole unlocking problem.

[r_dahl]

what's the problem w/ simply re-formatting in the hvx? curious.

[THoff]

You have to go into MCR mode to format the cards. That means you can't shoot continuously.

[jen_luk]

Yes, like THoff says, it's not possible to be shooting and also formating a P2 card on the HVX200 at the same time. We are shooting a documentary, so we do a lot of continuous shooting for long periods of time.

I also just tried erasing the P2 using Disk Utility, but that didn't work either. Same result ("FORMAT ERR!" upon insertion into HVX200). The options for erasing in Disk Utility basically format the P2 card like any other hard drive, and the available options such as "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)", "Unix"... etc. I am guessing none of those are the correct format. I think there is probably an HVX200-specific "format", so... I wonder if there is a way to format a P2 card with that format using a laptop (MacBook Pro)?

For the folks who have succesfully erased P2 cards on their Macs, what is your configuration/setup?

Thanks much,

-jen

[THoff]

The camera formats the P2 cards using FAT32, which Disk Utility should support -- I'm not sure what the program calls it since I don't use a Mac, but I think it might refer to it as "MS-DOS".

[jen_luk]

Thanks THoff. I did triy to format with MS-DOS option in Mac Disk Utility, but sadly that didn't work either. I also have a Win laptop that I don't use much, lying around, so I tried formatting the P2 card in that and it does work, so that helps, although of course for folks who ONLY have a Mac that is still not much use, and it is kind of a bummer to lug around a whole other laptop JUST to format P2 cards!

Fortunately I found the solution for erasing P2 cards on a Mac in this thread!
http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?t=106769
(post #12 by Arrik)

And also I mentioned that solution on this thread, in case anyone else happens to be searching
http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?t=105939&page=2

[David Jimerson]

As far as I know, there's no way to format a card on a Mac.

[Arrik]

delete*

Jen found the other thread.