Old Hard Drive, New Enclosure, Trying to Format

[polycat33]

I took my 5 year old hard drive out of my old PC and bought an external enclosure for it. It seemed pretty straightforward to put in, though when I fired it up it was making all kinds of weird vibration noises, on top of the hard drive noises which were really loud (but always were inside the PC as well). I opened it back up but don't see why it's vibrating like that and wonder if maybe it's that tha hard drive is just really messed up. It didn't die on me or anything on the old computer, I was still able to access the files on it (though just having it connected slowed my computer down like 100x, and it would not stop being busy enough to eject without putting my computer to sleep). I want to erase and format it but when I click on that drive in Disk Utility it doesn't let me actually use any of the options under the Erase tab. Anyone know what's up? Is there any way to save this hard drive? I thought if there were a lot of errors on the disk or something a format would fix that, but I can't even get that far. Open to all suggestions (including returning this enclosure cause my hard drive may be dying!)

 

[polycat33]

Could it be because I can only read off the disk and not write to it? That my computer won't let me format cause that would be like writing to it? If so, how to I bypass that? There has to be a way to format an NTFS hard drive on a Mac.

 

[polycat33]

I ended up getting it working, I had to eject the disk while keeping it plugged in, in order to get Disk Utility to give me the erase option. It's erased and reformatted and acting a LOT better, no more slow down or crazy noises.

Sorry, I don't know how to delete a post/thread that I've made or I'd delete this.