I am trying to reformat a WD 750gb had drive, and it is going SLOWWWWLY, it's been at about half way for 4 hours now, everything else on the computer is fine so I don't think its frozen, should I eject it and start all over again?
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reformatting a drive taking forever
- Thread starter Sonhascome
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I was trying mac os x extended (journal) with fastest as the security option
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WHen i try to rewrite it now it says "unable to write the last block of the drive" does that mean that I have a bad drive?
Are you trying to format the internal from Disk Utility started from the running OS x installation? If so, most times the system will not allow you to format or repair a disk when it is run from the host installation. You may need to boot from another OS X instance (bootable disk or USB installation) and then go into DU and erase the disk.
Found a couple of discussions on your error message:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1210385/
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3226425?start=0&tstart=0
I'm assuming this is an external drive plugged into your computer by USB or Firewire? One person claims it means the drive is bad and you can check the SMART status in Disk Utility. Other people from the Apple thread recommend the issue may be with Lion and to try running Disk Utility from the restore partition.
If you're not running Lion, guess it wouldn't hurt to try running Disk Utility from the install disk to format that drive, instead of from your computer.
Thanks for the input, I called customer service of the company from which I bought it, and they are going to give me a refund so i guess they feel its a bad drive too.