Problem Formatting One Terabyte Drive

[mjgkramer]

Just bought a 1 terabyte Western Digital My Book and hooked it up to my Intel iMac using the Firewire connection. In spite of the documentation saying it was formatted for a Mac, it was formatted as MS-DOS (Fat) according to the Disk Utility application. I tried to reformat it as Mac OS Extended. It failed saying that it could not format it because the drive could not be unmounted. It also renamed the volume from the original "My Book" to "rdisk3sl". I then tried to Erase the drive and it refused saying "newfs_rdisk3s1:partition size not a multiple of 4k". I could not find anywhere in Disk Utility to set the partition size to something else. At this point Disk Utility ground on forever (over night) without doing anything, forcing me to do a forced Quit of Disk Utility. I connected it as a USB drive and attempted to reformat the drive and the same things happened.

Questions -
(1) Is Disk Utility incapable of formatting a one terabyte drive?
(2) Is there another way to do a reformat that would restore the drive with Mac formatting?

[marksomebodyelse]

You have to use the partition the disk function first. make the disk 2 partitions then reformat it to 1 partition and name it what you want. Don't forget to format it to start up an intel mac

[mjgkramer]

I'm at the point that Disk Utility does not seem to be able to do anything with the drive. Is there a low level formatting command in UNIX or another utility that would reformat it? At this point all I can do is return it to Frys as being defective.

Where is the option to format it to start up an Intel Mac?

[kj4btkljv]

In Disk Utility, click on the first name for the drive, something like "931.5 GB Oxford Semi..." is what mine says. Then, on the Partition tab, if you want only 1 drive to use, drop down the "Volume Scheme" menu and select 1 Volume. Then, there's an Options button near the bottom. In there, make sure GUID Partition Table is set - that's where it will boot an Intel Mac. You may need to redo the volume scheme drop down after this selection, I'm not too sure. Name your drive, up in "Volume Information", then click the Partition button.

Does this work?

Jeff

[Doc]

marksomebodyelse has it right.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa...ID=8764729

[mjgkramer]

A while ago I decided to try writing zeroes to the drive. It didn't burp on that option and it appears to be working, at least it shows some progress in status bar. The only problem is that it estimates that it will take another fourteen hours. I plan to let it do its thing until it is done or appears to be having a problem.

[mjgkramer]

The zeroing processs seems to be working. The status bar has progressed and it now says 13 hours to go.

[heap1]

I just bought a refurbished 1 TB My Book Studio Edition drive from the Western Digital website. Before I could use the firewire connection without locking up my computer, I had to update the firmware on the drive.

I am upset at Western Digital for not indicating this in the box or updating the firmware themselves before they resold the drive. Once I did the firmware update, I have had no problems with the drive.

[mjgkramer]

At this point I am not very impressed with WD. I recently bought a 400GB My Passport Studio USB/FW400/FW800 drive from MacMall. I tried it immediately as a USB drive and it worked OK. 28 days after purchase I tried it as both a FW400 and FW800 drive on multiple Macs and it would not spin up. MacMall would not take it back, saying I would have to take it up with WD. WD was more than happy to replace it under warranty with a refurbished unit. I pointed out that mine was a new unit so that was what I wanted but they wouldn't. I also had to pay to ship it back to them. I received the replacement and it worked OK but I still am not happy about the whole transaction.

[Doc]

Neither WD nor Seagate makes a decent drive enclosure.

Having had problems with Hitachi and helped numerous people with dead Seagates in recent months, I'm very pro-WD for bare drives.