HD issues...

[aplasticspork]

I'm having some trouble with a 100 GB external bus powered drive. It's FAT 32 format so that I can use it with windows and OS X. Here's the story from the beginning:
I haven't used the drive in about a month, and needed it this afternoon, so I plugged it into the computer and it took about five minutes to mount. At this point I figured there was probably something wrong with it, so I tried to do a repair, disk utility just sat there thinking for about ten minutes after I hit repair, so I quit and remounted the drive. I copied all of my data off of it, and tried to erase it with the same results.
At this point it stopped showing up in either disk utility or on the desktop, so I started from the install CD and tried from there. Whenever I try to erase it it either says "Could not unmount disk", or "Bad file descriptor". If I try to zero the data it says "Could not open disk", and if I try to repair it the disk spins, but you can't hear it reading (or writing) anything from the disk.
I also tried in windows, and it mounts, but it can't reformat it into anything but NTFS, which is useless if I need to use it with OS X.
Last but not least, I tried using Norton Utilities (I know, I know, but I figured it was worth a try) and the disk doesn't even show up.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks,
--Andrzej

 

[mad jew]

Maybe try formatting it as NTFS and then reformatting it as FAT32 either via Windows or OSX.

 

[aplasticspork]

Maybe try formatting it as NTFS and then reformatting it as FAT32 either via Windows or OSX.

I'm afraid that OS X won't be able to read it at all though, I'm not sure if it can as I've never tried it. I know Windows doesn't give me the option to format it as FAT 32...but I suppose it's either that or have a broken hard drive. I'll try it tomorrow though, it's too late to do it now in my time zone.

--Andrzej

 

[mad jew]

I think 10.3 and later will be able to reformat an NTFS drive but I'll check around for confirmation. Nevertheless, a reformat to NTFS may help Windows then reformat it as FAT32.

 

[frankblundt]

you could also try fomatting the drive using fdisk in Terminal, although you'll need it to show up as a device to work out what its device name is (this is not for the faint of heart, very easy to wipe unintended drives!!).

Otherwise, i'd do like MJ said and format as NTFS in Windows (I don't think the Mac can format NTFS, only read it) and then back to FAT32 on the Mac (Windows won't format FAT32 bigger than 32GB without a third party app).