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benjammin82

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 9, 2014
3
0
Having trouble formatting a 140GB USB data drive. For starters when the thing is plugged in I get; 'the disk you inserted was not readable by this computer' so I attempt to initialize via disk utility and it won't let be repair or erase the volume. Just says file system formatter failed. Can any one help?
 

maflynn

macrumors Haswell
May 3, 2009
73,410
43,304
Maybe its defective?

Try plugging it into a PC and see if you get a similar response.
 

benjammin82

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 9, 2014
3
0
No joy on a PC either. Think it's a gonner. Worth a try though.

----------

It's in a 'raw' format which is read only. No idea
 

northernmunky

macrumors 6502a
Jan 19, 2007
825
288
London, Taipei
I've had drives that refuse for format in Disk Utility before, easiest way to force solve this is to format it via terminal, use:

Open Terminal, and type:
diskutil list


You'll get a list of attached drives with their partitions like this:
shousiqiangdaoPro:~ james$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk0
1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 999.7 GB disk0s2
3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3
/dev/disk1
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *500.1 GB disk1
1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk1s1
2: Microsoft Basic Data G-Drive 500 499.9 GB disk1s2
shousiqiangdaoPro:~ james$


Locate the path to your drive (in bold) (and be very careful to get the right disk, I would disconnect any drives you don't want to accidentally erase)
In my case my G-Drive500 is /dev/disk1

Then simply type in this format:
diskutil eraseDisk JHFS+ [NAME YOU WANT DISK TO BE CALLED WITH NO SPACES] [DISK PATH]

So for me that becomes:
diskutil eraseDisk JHFS+ G-Drive500 /dev/disk1
 

eljanitor

macrumors 6502
Feb 10, 2011
411
20
Bad controller board on the hard drive, or in the USB enclosure most likely.
 
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