Problem Formatting External HDD

[midgetski]

I have a WD My Book with two FAT32 partitions. I am trying to use Disk Utility to format/erase one of the partitions to use HFS+ however the Disk Utility hangs and when I quit the program the volumes become unreadable (though I have managed to rebuild them in windows). Anyone had this problem? Are there any other programs which I could try instead of Disk Utility?

I want to avoid destroying/formatting the other partition.

 

[BillytheImpaler]

Does it give any errors before it does? That's rather bizarre as I have never had any troubles with the Disk Utility despite using it a few times a day, every day.

 

[J1234]

Very strange, try booting from the OS X install disks (hold down C at boot up) and go to Disk Utility in there and try it.

 

[midgetski]

This is from the log file:

**********
Disk Utility started.

Preparing to erase : “Time Machine”
The volume could not be made bootable during erase
This new volume may not be bootable in the future
newfs_hfs: /dev/rdisk1s5: No such file or directory

Volume Erase failed with the error:

The underlying task reported failure on exit
Erase complete.

Mounting Disk
Erase complete.

 

[titchard]

Hmmmm that is a bit of a doozy.

I have been googling around for you to try and find if doing it by the terminal would be of any extra benefit but it turns out that it isn't.

How about you do the formatting in two steps?

Erase the drive completely - then reboot, then plug it in and format to the required type (HFS in your case).

It may work if you break it into two stages - but I am just spitballin' ideas with you here.

Rich

 

[midgetski]

I somehow managed to fix it. Not entirely sure how though. I went back into windows and reformatted the partition and added a couple of files. In Disk Utility, I then erased the partition and selected the option to write zeros to the partition and it worked.