External Hard Drive Initialization

Discussion in 'macOS' started by bbhuang, Dec 25, 2012.

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  1. bbhuang, Dec 25, 2012

    bbhuang macrumors newbie

    Joined:
    Jun 23, 2010
    #1
    I accidentally bumped the usb cable and disconnected an external hard drive while it was being formatted. I have not been able to format or initialize it since.

    It does not show up in disk utility. However it does show up in the system profiler.

    I've also tried initializing with Windows through VMWare Fusion and boot camp. No luck there either. I had an "Incorrect Function" error when in the Disk Management utility.

    How can I format this drive?
     
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  2. ScoobyMcDoo, Dec 26, 2012

    ScoobyMcDoo macrumors 65816

    Joined:
    Nov 26, 2007
    Location:
    Austin, TX
    #2
    In the system profiler, it should have a field: BSD Name. For example, I have a USB disk connected, and it's name is "disk1". Open a terminal and type in the command below, replacing disk1 with whatever the BSD Name is for your drive:

    sudo fdisk /dev/disk1

    Post the results.

    I'm guessing you will have to reinitialize the MBR sector using this fdisk command. For you reading pleasure, you can type the command "man fdisk" at the terminal prompt.
     
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