Disk Utility Freezing? External HDD NOT WORKING?

[shortyD12]

I bought a WD My Passport 071A Media 1TB External Hard drive yesterday and was hoping to use it for my Mac and PC laptop. So I plugged it into my mac and it asked me if I wanted to use it for Time Machine and I said yes. It reformatted it and then I realised i wanted to partition it so I went to Disk Utility and split it into two partitions, one 50GB for Time Machine and another 950GB for my other storage, and made that FAT32 format. So I copied a song onto that partition and noticed it was copying really slow, so I copied the same song to the 50GB partition and my other 1TB non-portable hard drive which is also FAT32 and it was normal speed. So I thought I should try removing the 50GB partition and halfway through my computer froze and I had to reset it. Now my hard drive won't work in Mac or Windows and when I open Disk Utility, I see it there but when I click on partition, it freezes and I have to Force Quit the application.

PLEASE HELP!!!

 

[DoFoT9]

poor external hard drive!

now, its probably best to start ALL over again.

this time - boot your Mac from the OSX Install disc that it came with, and run Disk Utility from it (through Utilities menubar).

this way, you can ensure that you set it up right, be sure to format the 950GB as FAT32, and the 50GB Time Machine as HFS+.

for extra advise, 50GB for time machine wont be enough, it is recommended that you have 1.5x the HDD space - so if your HDD is 500GB, have a 750GB TM backup drive.

 

[shortyD12]

ok im not going to reinstall os x because i will lose everything and now i want to get rid of the partitions because i am going to get a seperate hdd for time machine all i want is for my external hdd to work on windows and mac and go at normal speeds! i just tried to reformat it on windows but it said it could not complete? any more advice? thanx

 

[pastrychef]

Have you tried the hard drive on any other computers? It could just be a bad drive...

BTW, DoFoT9 wasn't suggesting that you reinstall OS X. Just to use Disk Utility from the OS X install disc.

 

[DoFoT9]

ok im not going to reinstall os x because i will lose everything and now i want to get rid of the partitions because i am going to get a seperate hdd for time machine all i want is for my external hdd to work on windows and mac and go at normal speeds! i just tried to reformat it on windows but it said it could not complete? any more advice? thanx

as pastry said, i didnt suggest reinstalling OSX - rather just formatting the new external HDD.

in any case, getting 2 seperate drives is a better option.

windows likely could not format as you created a GUID partition schema through OSX Disk Utility - windows is not compatible with it (your version of windows anyway).

Have you tried the hard drive on any other computers? It could just be a bad drive...

BTW, DoFoT9 wasn't suggesting that you reinstall OS X. Just to use Disk Utility from the OS X install disc.

the OP has stated that it does not work on any windows or mac computers he has tried.