Can't format external drive to Mac OS Extended (Journaled)

[steinramm]

Hi,

I have the external drive formated as FAT of 1TB.

I have erasing all data whole day (about 20 hours) and formating as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) but at the end it reports an error.

Now, when I connect hard drive to my MBP it says "disk is not readable on this computer" - Initialize...

When i try to format as Mac OS Extended (J) it says: "Disk erase failed with error: File system formated fail"

I tried to format it on PC (Vista and XP) but they even can't see hard disk.

What should I do to get journaled formated external hard drive?

Thanks in advance!

 

[surflordca]

How are you trying to format your HDD? From the "Disk Utility" icon highlite the disk you want to format. Not any disks inside the main disk. You have to select the mail disk you want to format...

 

[steinramm]

Hi, yes, from Disk Utility and I'm selecting main drive, not the one inside.

 

[-tWv-]

I had the same problem. I bought a WD My Book 1TB hard drive and there was a problem with it formatting. I wanted to use this disk for time machine as well as partition it so i had some miscellaneous storage space. This was my solution

Try formatting the disk to FAT, this worked fine for me, at least now it can be seen and read by both windows and osx. Then I went into time machine and selected "change disk". It then prompted me and said that it had to erase the entire drive and reformat. The reformatting with time machine worked fine and the drive was then in mac format. After it does that it starts to backup your drive, you can just cancel this and use the drive how you want. Or if you want to use it with time machine then let it do the initial backup. Make sure you always have a drive with a time machine backup of your computer on it because if somehow you mess up your disk, you are screwed if you didn't back up.

 

[madog]

You have to change the drive from Master Boot Record to GUID (Intel) or Apple Partition (PPC). Pretty much all drives not purchased at an Apple store will be MBR with a FAT format allowing it to work on both OS X and Windows, but MBR can't be formatted to HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) specifically for Macs. However, GUID works with HFS+ and FAT/NTFS partitions, as seen with BootCamp. Although, that might just be a Mac specific thing, and if you want true cross compatibility it may need to be MBR/FAT.

Otherwise:

Disk Utility
Select Drive from left
Click Partition Tab
Select 1 partition from pull down menu (or whatver you want, though this must be changed from "Current")
Click Options button
Select your Partition Table, click OK
Change format to what you want
Name your partition
Hop on one leg
Dance in a circle!
Click Apply

Same deal if you want to store a 4GB+ file on a flash drive. They are all MBR/FAT and can't store such large files, so if you use a Mac you can format it to GUID/HFS for the transfer, and then can change it back with Disk Utility to MBR/FAT for normal use.

 

[-tWv-]

Oh thanks, i guess the time machine formatting changes the drive to GUID and formats it. That's why it works. Thanks for clearing that up