¿¿ initialising external hard drive ??

Formatting a new drive is normally pretty instant--30 to 60 seconds. If you are zeroing the drive it will take a couple hours and if you're writing random data over it 8x then it will take days. Since this is a new drive all you need is a normal initialization.

Open Disk Utility and click on your new drive. Click the "Erase" tab and under options make sure that both boxes (for zeroing and random write) are unchecked. Click OK, then Erase. That should do it quite quickly.

When I bought my external Hard Drive, I had to zero it in order for it to work. Try just erasing it first and see if that works, but I doubt it. Here's what I did:

1. Insert the software restore CD and restart your computer holding down the "c" key in order to boot from the CD.

2. Go to File>open Disk Utility.

3. Select the hard drive (not volume) you want to zero and click the erase tab.

4. Select a format (probably Mac OS Extended (Journaled)) and then click options.

5. Check the box that says "Zero All Data" and then hit OK.

6. Click the erase button and watch it zero your hard drive.

For my 200GB Hard Drive on my 12" 1Ghz PB, it took about 6 hours to complete. You won't be able to use any applications, because you'll be running off the CD. In my mind, here's how why you need to zero it: When you get the HD, it's blank. In order to be able to write on it, it needs to be formatted. So, by putting the zeros on the drive, it's giving it a format. Could be wrong, but it helped ease my frustration when it wouldn't format by just erasing it.

Good Luck,
JOD8FY

JOD8FY said:

So, by putting the zeros on the drive, it's giving it a format. Could be wrong

Click to expand...

Could be.

Zeroing a drive is mostly a security measure, though I have done it on a drive that had the file system get badly hosed. Might have been overkill but it can't hurt anything.

I've installed a lot of new drives and never had to do anything but a normal initialization to get them to work. I zero them when I take them out of the computer--when I don't know where they're going next.