Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

C.Bledsoejr

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 10, 2010
11
0
CA
This is kind of hard for me to explain so I'll do my best.

I have an external hard drive enclosure via eSATA with 2 hard drives inside. They are 1.5GB each for a total of 3TB. I've been running this harddrive as a SPAN so that I could just have Time Machine running across both drives. This has been fine, but I've been wanting to switch it to a RAID 1 since 1.5GB was actually plenty to cover what I needed. Therefore the Time Machine would be 1.5GB and the second hard drive would just mirror that as a back up of my Time Machine.

So I tried to reformat the entire drive, and first, it sat at "shrinking filesystem" for hours with no activity. I ended up quitting that and trying something else. Then I umounted it via Disk Utility before I tried reformatting again and it hung at "unmounting volume..." *sigh*

So I kind of gave up. But now, when I do "Get Info" on my Time Machine, it says it is nearly full at 2.97TB. Before, it was at some odd 1.47TB (half). In Disk Utility, if I check the Time Machine drive it shows it is mirrored (Which I never did) but the RAID set shows Concatenated (Which is what I originally intended this drive to be for).

What the hell!?

Even Drive Genius won't reformat this drive. This is turning out worse than I expected and I have no clue what to do. In reality, I'd love to just completely wipe my Time Machine and start again but how the hell do I do that safely?

Any help is appreciated, I really wanted this to be an easy reformat but somehow this get screwed up and I really don't understand it = /
 
After repairing the disk via disk utility it returned back to 1.47GB. It must've corrupted some of the data when I quit (Which was expected).

I'd still like to reformat the drive, if possible. I'd love to get another external like this and just mirror that, but I don't have the money for that...
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.