External hard drive formatting stuck for 3hours!

[rani]

Hi
I have recently bought a new MAcmini and I love it.
I had been using a simpletech 400GB drive on windows and I moved it to the MAcmini.
Unfortunately it was formatted in NTFS.
I am using Disk utility to format it to DOS.
I went to erase and chose the volume format to be MS-DOS and then clicked on erase.
The disk utility has been active for more than 3 hours and I can not stop it or kill the application!

HELP!!!!!

 

[GimmeSlack12]

Might want to unplug the drive and do it again. There is no data on the drive so there is nothing wrong with doing this.

 

[ddekker]

external drive format

I agree with the unplug and try again, but I am underthe belief that you can't format a drive that large in FAT32. not to mention I also hear that FAT32 can't have a file larger than 4 gig (not good for video files, they get BIG)

read: http://trialsoftheswitch.com/index.php/2006/10/04/mac-ntfs/

DD

 

[pianoman]

I agree with the unplug and try again, but I am underthe belief that you can't format a drive that large in FAT32. not to mention I also hear that FAT32 can't have a file larger than 4 gig (not good for video files, they get BIG)

bingo. the largest file size you can have on a FAT32 drive is 4GB, not to mention the partition is restricted to 32GB anyway. too many restrictions.