Cannot format external drive as Mac OS Extended

[Errk!]

I have a Western Digital Elements 1TB External USB drive and am unable to format 1 partition as Mac OS Extended (or Journaled for that matter) in Disk Utility.

I can format the drive as FAT32 with no issue, and I can format the drive as FAT32 with 1 NTFS partition with no issue. But any time I try to format the partition as Mac OS Extended or Mac OS Extended Journaled it reports an underlying error and stops.

I can't figure it out. I don't know what the problem is or what to look for. Does anyone have any pointers?

 

[JediMeister]

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2644

 

[Tumbleweed666]

I have a Western Digital Elements 1TB External USB drive and am unable to format 1 partition as Mac OS Extended (or Journaled for that matter) in Disk Utility.

I can format the drive as FAT32 with no issue, and I can format the drive as FAT32 with 1 NTFS partition with no issue. But any time I try to format the partition as Mac OS Extended or Mac OS Extended Journaled it reports an underlying error and stops.

I can't figure it out. I don't know what the problem is or what to look for. Does anyone have any pointers?

I had this issue on a 1TB drive last week, selecting GUID was the key (otherwise I got all sorts of errors) and FWIW I couldn't select that until I had changed it from 'current' partition scheme to something else (1 partition in my case).

HTH

 

[Errk!]

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2644

Did the trick - thanks.

 

[Errk!]

I still have a problem - while the drive was able to be formatted and I was able to write to it, I am unable to use it for what I need. I am using the drive as a storage drive for the Popcorn Hour media player. It runs a Linux-based OS, if that makes a difference. When I plug in the drive it says "USB failed".

I don't understand. Is it the size of the drive (1 TB) that determines it must be GUID? Because I have a 250gb and a 500 gb and those do not use the GUID partition table and they work on the Popcorn Hour just fine.

 

[Tumbleweed666]

I still have a problem - while the drive was able to be formatted and I was able to write to it, I am unable to use it for what I need. I am using the drive as a storage drive for the Popcorn Hour media player. It runs a Linux-based OS, if that makes a difference. When I plug in the drive it says "USB failed".

I don't understand. Is it the size of the drive (1 TB) that determines it must be GUID? Because I have a 250gb and a 500 gb and those do not use the GUID partition table and they work on the Popcorn Hour just fine.

Are you saying that this drive,while it works fine on a Mac, doesn't work on a Popcorn Media Player and its Popcorn that gives the error not the Mac? In that case, whats it go to do with Mac if Popcorn doesn't like GUID??? Shouldn't you be asking the Q on a Popcorn forum?

Or why not just format it on a PC? Why did you even reformat it in the first place as surely it came ready 'out of the box' to run on PC and I'm presuming therefore popcorn as well??

 

[Errk!]

Are you saying that this drive,while it works fine on a Mac, doesn't work on a Popcorn Media Player and its Popcorn that gives the error not the Mac? In that case, whats it go to do with Mac if Popcorn doesn't like GUID??? Shouldn't you be asking the Q on a Popcorn forum?

Or why not just format it on a PC? Why did you even reformat it in the first place as surely it came ready 'out of the box' to run on PC and I'm presuming therefore popcorn as well??

The reason I formatted it as HFS was because as it was formatted before (NTFS) I was having a problem with corrupted files. I read a tip on a website that I don't remember that said Macs sometimes have problems with NTFS drives so I thought I'd try HFS and it stopped the corrupt files problem I was having. So NTFS is not an option. FAT32 is not an option because most of the files going on the drive are over 2GB in size.

And my question is not "how can I make this work with the PCH", it's "why can't the drive be formatted like I need it to be seeing as how I haven't had a problem doing this very thing before". That it is being used with a PCH is irrelevant, really.