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Exernal Hardrive "Not Readable" After Disk Utility Erase

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PushkarM7

macrumors newbie
Original poster
I used my new WD 300G external hard drive to copy some files from my brother's Macbook Pro. After Copying the files to my Macbook Pro, I wanted to use the external drive as my "Time Machine".

The time machine prompted me that I need to erase all the files using disk utility. The file structure displayed had the name of the device then a sub disk. I used the erase menu to clear the sub disk. Now when I plug in the external hard drive all I get is a prompt saying the device is not readable by this computer. The same prompt comes up on my brothers computer.

Did I ruin the hard drive?
 
You should be selecting the drive itself, rather than the partition listed underneath. Format the drive to Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
 
The drive isn't ruined, and it may be a bit premature to tell you this. You have a few more troubleshooting steps to take... but there is a bug in 10.5's Disk Utility that will cause a disk to become unreadable after being erased. I did it to one of my hard drives and it took me forever to find the solution via google.

I had to use my G3 iMac running Tiger (10.4) to partition it and then it worked just fine. If this ends up being the issue, you probably just need to take it to another computer (preferably a Mac, but a PC may work, the you'd need to bring it back to your machine running 10.5 and re-partition NOT ERASE) and repartition it.
 
PushkarM7 said:
Now when I plug in the external hard drive all I get is a prompt saying the device is not readable by this computer. The same prompt comes up on my brothers computer.
Click to expand...

This is the same thing mine was doing and it wouldn't show up at all in Disk Utility. There wasn't even a way to work on the thing in Leopard.
 
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