Reformatting empty external hard drive.

[Jesse Smith]

How long should it take to reformat an empty external hard drive? It's a GForce MegaDisk two terabyte hard drive and it's been going for about 11 hours with no sign of stoping.

Shouldn't it be pretty quick, since the hard drive is empty??

 

[Tumbleweed666]

How long should it take to reformat an empty external hard drive? It's a GForce MegaDisk two terabyte hard drive and it's been going for about 11 hours with no sign of stoping.

Shouldn't it be pretty quick, since the hard drive is empty??

I've recently reformatted a few USB 2 drives from FAT and NTFS to HFS and it took a few minutes per drive.
Have you elected to erase data maybe? I havent used that option but perhaps that does a secure overwrite in which case 2Tb could take days to weeks (having just taken 3 days to securely wipe (on PC) some considerably smaller disks)

 

[Jesse Smith]

I had erase selected (Which the guide says to do.), except it's an empty external hard drive, so it shouldn't take forever. Just bought it and Time Machine says it has to be reformated first.

 

[miles01110]

Definitely shouldn't take that long to simply reformat it. Are you sure it's not backing up your data?

 

[Jesse Smith]

OK, I got it figured out.

The Erase option isn't what you wanna choose, instead you wanna click the partition option, click options, and select GUID Partition Table as your "partition map scheme" instead of MBR (Master Boot Record).

They just got the instructions wrong in the guide that comes with it. It only took seconds.

Oh boy, Time Machine will be buzy for awhile...

**Backing up 1,346,010 items.

1.05 GB of 774.79 GB**