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4TB Hard Drive formatted for Mac OS, need help!

thiagos

thiagos

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Dec 20, 2007
371
0
NYC (Manhattan)
I am having a huge dilemma with my new Western Digital 4TB Hard Drive. It came formatted for Mac OS and I need to format it under NTFS. The problem is Windows will
not format it, I always get an error message. I have tried two different machines. The major issue is that I cannot format it to FAT32 first before formatting it under NTFS bc the drive is larger than 2TB.

My media player will not recognize Apple's format...

What can I do in this case?
 
Check the partition scheme of the drive. Is it set to something other than MBR? Change the partition scheme to MBR first, in Disk Utility. Then, Windows should recognize and format it properly.
 
wrldwzrd89 said:
Check the partition scheme of the drive. Is it set to something other than MBR? Change the partition scheme to MBR first, in Disk Utility. Then, Windows should recognize and format it properly.
Click to expand...

Hi, Thanks for the help but it won't let me select Master Boot Record, it will only let me select GUID partition table or Apple Partition Map.

WOuld any one of those work?
 
I believe MBR cannot deal with single partitions larger than 2TB. You must use GPT (GUID Partition Table). Which version of Windows are you using? Vista and 7 are fine with GPT. Just set the partition table as GPT, and take it into Windows and format it there as NTFS. Windows does not need to be able to read the partition's old format to be able to nuke it.

XP and GPT is a little stickier, IIRC. I forget what is involved there.
 
Ok, so I formatted it with GUID Partition. I am using Windows 7 and it will not format. This is the message I get while trying to format the HD. "Windows cannot format this drive. Quit any disk utilities or other programs that are using this drive, and make sure that no window is displaying the contents of the drive. Then try formatting again."

The funny this is that no softwares are currently using the drive nor do I have any windows opened.

I truly do not know what else to do....
 
so why don't you format it to ntfs using disk utility? don't know if osX does this out of the box. but I've got macfuse and ntfs-3G installed, and I am able to format a drive to ntfs in snow leopard, as I also did in leopard.

edit: I believe you only need ntfs 3g : http://www.ntfs-3g.org/ . after you instal this, you should be able you select ntfs as a format in disk utility.

let us know if it worked please!
 
windels said:
so why don't you format it to ntfs using disk utility? don't know if osX does this out of the box. but I've got macfuse and ntfs-3G installed, and I am able to format a drive to ntfs in snow leopard, as I also did in leopard.

edit: I believe you only need ntfs 3g : http://www.ntfs-3g.org/ . after you instal this, you should be able you select ntfs as a format in disk utility.

let us know if it worked please!
Click to expand...


that was exactly why i was going to suggest as well. never tried a 4TB drive though..
 
crazyxzer0 said:
that was exactly why i was going to suggest as well. never tried a 4TB drive though..
Click to expand...

I downloaded it, it doesn't work. The drive works fine if I use Extended Journaled but Windows will not format it.

The software you suggested does not find the volume. I don't know what else to do, I never had this issue before with my 2TB Hard Drive, I could format it any way I wanted to....
 
thiagos said:
I downloaded it, it doesn't work. The drive works fine if I use Extended Journaled but Windows will not format it.

The software you suggested does not find the volume. I don't know what else to do, I never had this issue before with my 2TB Hard Drive, I could format it any way I wanted to....
Click to expand...

how do you mean, "does not find the volume?" ntfs-3g just ads ntfs to the supported format types in osX . it doesn't have a real UI or something like that. It just lets you WRITE to ntfs , which I believe isn't so natively and it also lets you chose NTFS in disk utility, the same as you can choose fat 32 or something like that. you don't need windows to format it to ntfs, you just use disk utility under mac osX. You do know how to use disk utility, do you?

sorry if my english is crap, we speak Dutch over here.
 
It's not a 4TB drive. There are no 4TB HDDs out there.

It's 2x 2TB drives in a single enclosure. This could be linked to your problems.
 
RedTomato said:
It's not a 4TB drive. There are no 4TB HDDs out there.

It's 2x 2TB drives in a single enclosure. This could be linked to your problems.
Click to expand...

I know it is two 2TB hard drives but how would that be linked to my problem? My old drive was two 1TB drives and I never had any issues with it. It must be a Windows 7 issue because Vista would format it just fine...
I might partition the drive in two 2TB then format to FAT32 on Mac OSX and on windows format in NTFS and then try to make it one partition, I will keep you guys updated....
 
thiagos said:
The software you suggested won't even locate my external drive. I need to format it to NTFS and it won't format it...
Click to expand...
You don't use NTFS-3g itself to format drives. NTFS-3g adds NTFS support to software you already use, like Disk Utility (the tool you need to use, in this case).
 
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