Can't reformat hard drive for time machine

[winterdude010]

Hi,

Just got done installing Leopard, and when it recognized that the external hard drive was is MS-DOS format, it started to reformat it. However, a few seconds after the reformatting begins, and error message pops up saying that the formatting system failed. Why won't it reformat?

My external drive is a:

Western Digital My Book Essentials 750GB External Hard Drive

 

[mkrishnan]

The problem is that the disk has the wrong partition scheme to host a Mac partition. For this reason, you can't reformat it directly. You must first re-partition it.

Don't use the Time Machine prompt to reformat it. Open Disk Utility, go to the partition tab, and set it up as a single MacOS Extended / Journaled (HFS+) partition using the GUID scheme (you may have to click on the options button). Then let it partition the drive. After that, it should work fine.

 

[winterdude010]

I've been doing it that way (by using disk utility), sorry for not specifying that.

 

[72930]

Disk Utility in 10.5.0 is very buggy, try a few more times...

 

[winterdude010]

OK. Solved the problem. I partitioned the drive as free space, and then partitioned it as MacOS Extended/ Journaled and it worked.