A Pickle: moving a hard drive from Windows PC to use as main HDD of MacOS - Help

[benyben123]

Hi.
So, I have this 500GB HDD that was pulled out of 2011 MBP and was formated using Diskpart a few months back and was used via usb-3-to-sata-cable as en external storage device.

Time came to reuse this HDD as the main hard disk of the mac.

I was under the impression that the Disk Utility will "know" how to deal with the HD but it fails to format the drive.

So I cannot install High Sierra (I am using a USB with bootable High Sierra installation).

What am I doing wrong?

Do I need to do something on the windows machine prior to using the mac's disk utility?

Thanks so much for helping!!!

 

[Fishrrman]

Suggestion (yes, I know this sounds out-of-whack):

a. boot using the USB flash drive installer
b. try to erase the HDD to exFat (yes, exFat)
c. does this work?
d. if so, NOW erase it a second time to Mac OS extended with journaling enabled, GUID partition format.
Any better?

 

[bogdanw]

Do I need to do something on the windows machine prior to using the mac's disk utility?

From Windows, you can clean the drive with diskpart (diskpart, list disk, select disk 2, clean). You can then format it from Disk Utility.
You can do the something similar from Terminal, once you booted from the High Sierra USB.
Use diskutil list physical to list the disks available and diskutil eraseDisk JHFS+ NewName GPT disk0 to format the disk as HFS+ Journaled.
Make sure you choose the correct disk in both cases.

 

[CoastalOR]

Boot from the High Sierra USB installer thumb drive. Use the Mac Disk Utility to erase the drive to Mac Extended (journaled) with GUID partition scheme. IMPORTANT: Make sure you set the Disk Utility View to "Show All Devices" BEFORE erasing the drive.

 

[benyben123]

Thank you both very much.

This is the error I am getting:

 

[||\||]

I can’t see that you are doing anything wrong. The HDD is seven years old. It might be done. Using an application to view SMART data would help determine this.

 

[benyben123]

I can’t see that you are doing anything wrong. The HDD is seven years old. It might be done. Using an application to view SMART data would help determine this.

I think you maybe correct!!!! I am not sure why this hasn't occurred to me. Can a drive appear to be OK on Dispart (no actual check) but actually be faulty?

You are 100%. This drive must be broken.

THANK YOU VERY MUCH FOR THE HELP!!!! I do appreciate it. (you guys saved me a lot of time)

 

[Fishrrman]

Before you write off the drive as failed hardware, I suggest you take the advice I gave in post 2 above.
Have you tried that?

 

[benyben123]

Thank you for posting this comment.

It happens to be that I just tried something else. I have switched to a different drive, and tried to isntall Ubuntu. But Ubuntu also did not manage to format the drive.

Now I know I am confusing two things here (since I have introduced another factor into this equation), but I don't think it's the drive.

I think what happned is that when (this was a while back) I took these hard drive out of these macs and formatted these to work as windows compatible stroage devices (mostly media storage), it perhaps did something to these drives to make them not compatible with installing OSs on them?

Forgive me for not knowing a damn thing about formating and file systems, so I am really in the blind here.

See this from just 2 hours ago:

https://imgur.com/YLBr4pS