Leave the external drive switched on and connected.
Shut down the Mac. Not just a restart, shut it down.
Start it up again.
Now run Disk utility and see if you can initialize the drive. Warning: This will erase ALL the data on the drive.
Further point. Firewire is the connectivity option of choice for the Mac. If your drive is USB, did you initialize it when you got it or did it work immediately?
If immediately, then you may have a drive that was formatted using FAT or FAT32 and not HFS+(Journaled) which is normal for a Mac.
Let us know how you get on
P
Hey everyone! After a series of unfortunate events that began innocently enough, it appears I've trashed my WD 60 GB external USB hard drive.
I was using the drive to back up my iTunes library. When I found that it was also backing up my 30+ GB of video onto the drive and saw how slow it was, I clicked "stop" in iTunes which actually caused it to 'unexpectedly quit'. (I saw it coming).
So I tried to delete everything off the drive so I could try again (after removing videos from my iTunes Library). I found that it wouldn't let me delete everything, so I went to Disk Utility and went to erase to get rid of anything on the drive.
That failed multiple times and I kept quitting out until I got it to work. Now that's where I am now. After the erase, the disk is basically unusable. iTunes alerted me saying that the disk "cannot be read or written", and Disk Utility will not verify, repair, erase, or partition the disk being that "the disk cannot be unmounted".
Can anyone tell me how to wipe this drive so I can bring it back to a "clean slate" state????
Thanks a lot,
Alex

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