Disk Utility cannot format new 4TB hard drive

[sstolee]

Running MacOS 10.7.5 on a 27iMac. I just bought a new 4 TB WD Red SATA III 5400 HDD. When mounted on an external connection, the drive is seen (identified by model in the list: "WDC WD40EFRX-68W0N0 Media") by Disk Utility, but all the ERASE tab functions are 'grayed' out and cannot be operated.

Anyone know what's up with this?
Thanks!

 

[rw3]

Try to repartition it...not just do an erase of the drive?

 

[Wispy]

Open disk utility in Recovery HD (or boot from external HD) and try there to do this.

 

[mbh]

A few times I've had to zero out the first several blocks of a drive in order to get OS X to let go of it and treat it as an unknown disk. dd does this easily, but double check that command line because it's also easy to kill the wrong drive.

 

[Chippy99]

Do you have Bootcamp, or a laptop with Windows on it by any chance?

If you do, run a command prompt in Windows (run as Administrator) and use Diskpart to clean the disk.

Something like:

diskpart
list disk
select disk n (where n is the disk number obtained from the list command above)
clean
exit

After doing this, OS X will be able to do whatever you need.