formatting a drive > 138 gb

[Julianne]

Hi all,

I'm having a very hard time get my new 300gig drive formatted past 138gb. I have tried it in my MDD, firewire case, and in a Win PC. None of the above can seem to format it to 300gb. I have searched both here and on the apple.com board but I could not find a solution. I will also add that I have 3 of these 300 Maxtor drives. One was able to be formatted to 300gb, that was because it was done in the WIN PC. Then the next one I tried in a firewire case and via my win notebook but it only saw 128gb and I know the firewire case is compatible cuz it came with a 250gb hard drive in it. the 3rd drive was initiated on the WIN PC and then put in the firewire case and still both the mac nb and win nb saw it as only 138gb. I have placed it in the MDD but it couldnt format it past 138. I do have all large drives in the MDD all are 160gb plus.

Any help PLEASE

 

[Poeben]

Sounds like it could be that the drive is ATA-133 but you don't have an ATA-133 controller? I'm not too familiar with the MDD innards. Do you have a pci ATA card installed or are you hooking them all to the built in connectors? Also, some firewire bridge chipsets don't support large drives. But since you said you haven't had problems before, you may already have ruled out these possibilities. Only other thing I can think to check would be jumper settings.

 

[wrldwzrd89]

It sounds to me like the computer/connector you're using to hook that drive up to the Mac has a physical addressing limitation of 138 GB. Check this article on Apple's Support site for more information on this issue.

 

[ryan42]

Yeah. Those big drives are toughies. Just go ahead and mail the drive to me and I'll format it for you and ... ummm ... "send it back."


Disclaimer: I am not responsable if your 300 GB drive shrinks to 200 MB during shipping.