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General discussion

Huge problem with external hard drive.. need help!

Jan 12, 2008 3:28AM PST

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

Discussion is locked

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That pesky disk
Jan 12, 2008 9:43AM PST

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

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I wish I could get a Firewire drive...
Jan 12, 2008 10:08AM PST

But I'm stuck with this for now.

On restart I found the icon for the drive on the desktop, but found it was still "unreadable and unwriteable", although I could see what it contained (just not open it). I opened disk utility and went to Erase to reformat it as a FAT (MS-DOS) drive, which is still in process. But after 2-3 minutes, the progress bar hasn't moved past about a centimeter into the bar.


Alex

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Just got this message:
Jan 12, 2008 10:09AM PST
Disk Erase failed with the error:

File system formatter failed.


Is there any "manual" or third party way of wiping the drive clean?

Alex
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Why would you format the drive
Jan 12, 2008 9:46PM PST

as FAT (MS-DOS)?

Was that the only option available?

P

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Yes, why FAT?
Jan 12, 2008 10:33PM PST

I must add here that it's not reliable, prone to vanishing if power or connection is lost at the wrong moment.

Bob

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(NT) It came as FAT32
Jan 13, 2008 12:47AM PST
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(NT) And I had repeatedly tried Mac OS Extended
Jan 13, 2008 12:49AM PST
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I wish it came blank.
Jan 13, 2008 12:49AM PST

But then no one would buy them since they don't work "out of the box." So they have to use the Lowest Common Denominator file system whether it be stable or not.

Your choice to use a file system that is flighty or not.

Bob

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I got the answer at Apple Support Forums!
Jan 13, 2008 12:59AM PST

The reason the disk wouldn't unmount was that Spotlight was trying to index it (which it couldn't since it was slightly corrupted).

By putting the disk in the Privacy section in Spotlight Preferences I got Disk Utility to sucessfully erase and reformat the drive to "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)".

I remember having seen it under the setting "Mac OS Extended (Case sensitive, journaled)". Should I put it to that? (What's the difference)?

Thanks for the help guys,
Alex

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See that word "journaled"?
Jan 13, 2008 1:03AM PST

It's how the file system recovers from upsets like power loss, lost connections, etc.

FAT32 is not journaled.

Bob

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Cool!
Jan 13, 2008 1:54AM PST

So a drive with that format will work with Windows as well?

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Looking at your posts.
Jan 13, 2008 2:01AM PST

You didn't reveal that till now. Fat32 is the easy choice for trading files with the PC but it is unstable and will crash and burn too often.

-> Research MACFUSE and experiment with NTFS.

Bob