New Exernal HD won't format to OS Extended Journaled

[downingp]

I just bought a My Book Western Digital 1TB external hard drive. Out of the box, it is formatted in MS-DOS (FAT) format. I want to change it to Mac OS Extended (Journaled). I went to disk utility to erase and reformat the drive, but I keep getting an error message: Disk erase failed: File system formatter failed.

Any ideas as to what is going on? Thanks.

 

[merl1n]

I just bought a My Book Western Digital 1TB external hard drive. Out of the box, it is formatted in MS-DOS (FAT) format. I want to change it to Mac OS Extended (Journaled). I went to disk utility to erase and reformat the drive, but I keep getting an error message: Disk erase failed: File system formatter failed.

Any ideas as to what is going on? Thanks.

In Disk Utility, are you selecting the volume or actual disk device name (above the volume name)?

You need to select the actual device to reformat it.

 

[downingp]

I actually ended up just opening up time machine and letting it reformat the drive. For some reason it worked refomatting in time machine but not in disk utility