Disk Utility Not Formatting External USB Drive

Hello,

I recently upgraded to Leopard. Around this same time, my company purchased two, 1 Terabyte USB External drives for my coworker and I in the graphics/web development department. They arrived this morning and we were very excited.

My problem is that I cannot get Disk Utility to erase/format the new, external USB TB drive for use with my MBP. Disk Utility fails almost immediately with the following message:

"*Disk Erase Failed*
Disk Erase failed with the error:
File system formatter failed."

The options I'm choosing for the Erase are:
Volume Format: MAC OS EXTENDED (i've even tried the 'journaled' version too)
Name: TB

As soon as I hit 'Erase' I get the error message I listed above. The volume never mounts on my desktop and does not exist. I can see the drive itself in the System Profiler, so my Mac sees it, it just can't format it! I've also made sure all my permissions were repaired, so I'm just a little confused as to why this simple task keeps failing?

Is there some additional, esoteric step that I'm missing?

My coworker was able to get his disk to work because he did NOT have Time Machine turned on yet. When he connected his new TB drive, Time Machine asked him to format/initialize the disk and he of course said "ok." I had Time Machine set to use my OLD external USB drive and it's been working great. As of this writing, my coworker is a happy camper. I, however, am not. I'm not blaming Time Machine, just noting the differences between my coworker's experience and my own. Since the volume is not currently mounted on my machine, I can't format my disk the same way as my coworker has done using Time Machine, since Time Machine doesn't see the volume.

My fear is that the manufacturer (whom I've also contacted and am awaiting their response) will throw this back to a software problem....and the folks on the forum here will point their fingers and say 'hardware problem.' Ah, the eternal struggle.....who to blame? 😉

Any help or additional troubleshooting tips are greatly appreciated.

MBP 17", Mac OS X (10.5.1), Fantom Drives 1TB External USB drive

Posted on Dec 12, 2007 9:56 AM

24 replies

Jun 14, 2008 9:49 PM in response to Hazem Malek

Hazem- I'm having the exact same problem As John Stalzer on this thread. 80 gig Maxtor external firewire drive. Disk will not mount to desktop. Won't verify, erase or partition in disk utilities under Leopard 10.5.3. becaus the "resource is busy." Disk utilities "sees" 19.1 gigs of the 80.... Wow, what a mess!

Your suggestion to use Terminal is frightening. This kinda stuff is way beyond my experience. Apparently sudo is very serious business. Leopard asks for passwords and warns about loss of data complete with "are you really, really sure you want to do this??? You can really screw up your machine..." (Or words to that effect.)

You use tech jargon I don't understand like "kill."

If I'm reading terminal correctly, my bad disk is #2.

Are you suggesting I type

diskutil erasedisk HFS+ Macintosh\ HD disk2

??

Jun 15, 2008 2:30 AM in response to powermixx

I have the same problem, and your elegant solution works perfectly.
Earlier I'd asked the Tech Support of my 1TB Drive vendor and they apparently
also do not know what to do.
Perhaps the one small step missing in your process is at the Partition,
change the current (volume scheme) to 1 or more Partition, before the Options is available for change.

Thank you.

Jul 13, 2008 1:34 AM in response to Norman Wallen

sorry for the late reply,

diskutil erasedisk HFS+ Macintosh\ HD disk2

to erase your disk

but that if you couldn't erase due to resource busy, you use the lsof command to identify which processes are using then kill them using "kill -9 PID"

Jul 22, 2008 10:10 AM in response to dechamp

I was having a similar issue; couldn't get a LaCie Big Disk Extreme (1 TB) to mount. It said the volume was formatted using "FAT" and I wanted "Mac OS Extended Journaled".

In Disk Utility, I selected the hard drive in question, went to the "Partition" tab, selected "1" from "Volume Scheme", renamed the drive (under "Name"), and under "Options" chose APM ("Apple Partition Map").

10 minutes later, I have a working drive.

Big thanks to "dechamp" on this one.

-R-

nkalias

Level 1

0 points

Aug 20, 2008 2:56 AM in response to Hazem Malek

Hazem please help,

I have recently run into the same problems being discussed on this page. I have a 500G Western Digital that I cannot erase or partition after having some recent issues with it.

I have tried everything you have suggested to do in Terminal. When I use the "lsof" command I get the same prompt returned back to me so I proceed with "diskutil erasedisk HFS+ Macintosh\ HD disk1" (disk1 is the problem disk). After that step I get the "Resource busy (16)" response. At this point I have tried going back to the "lsof" command but no processes are reported so I even tried "kill -9 PID" and then I get "-bash: kill: PlD: arguments must be process or job IDs"

Now what do I do? I have no clue. Thanks in advance for any help.

Sep 10, 2008 8:42 PM in response to nkalias

Another thing to try is to shut everything down. Unplug or power off the external HD. Change cables, or try different ports. Restart and see if Leopard tells you the drive is not readable. If this occurs, you'll have a chance to re-initialize it (Leopard will open Disk Utility and you can follow the instructions above). Good luck.

Untmdsprt

Level 2

397 points

Oct 23, 2008 3:20 AM in response to Hazem Malek

I'm getting the same thing with my hard drive. I'm getting this in the terminal:

/dev/disk0
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID partitionscheme *111.8 Gi disk0
1: EFI 200.0 Mi disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 111.5 Gi disk0s2
/dev/disk1
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: *0.0 B disk1

DiskManagement setuid-tool failure
XXX:~ XXXXXX$ sudo lsof |grep disk1
Password:
XXX:~ XXXXXX$ sudo lsof | grep disk1
XXX:~ XXXXXX$ diskutil erasedisk HFS+ Macintosh\ HD disk1
Started erase on disk disk1
Creating partition map
[ \ 0%................................................... ]
Partitioning encountered error on disk disk1: Device not configured (6)

The drive is a 500GB Western Digital. Am I s * out of luck with it or can it be saved? Note: the XXX is not the actual name of the computer or username.

If you suggest a terminal command, please spell it out for me and the others. Not stupid, just not a power terminal user. 😉

Thanks!

mycatrex

Level 1

0 points

Nov 10, 2008 7:32 PM in response to Untmdsprt

I'm having a similar problem partitioning a WD external firewire drive on a MBP 2.4 GHz running OS X 10.5.5.

Disk utility got me nowhere. At one point using Terminal, i was able to create a drive partition successfully using the command:

mbp:~ richyung$ diskutil partitionDisk /dev/disk2 1 APMFormat HFS+ MEGATERA 1.36T

But then when I attempted to write zeros to the drive from Disk Utility, I got this error:

Volume Erase failed with the error:
The underlying task reported failure on exit.

Following the advise in this post, I confirmed no processes are running against the disk and tried to repartition, but still get this error:

mbp:~ richyung$ sudo lsof | grep disk2
mbp:~ richyung$ diskutil partitionDisk /dev/disk2 1 APMFormat HFS+ MEGATERA 1.36TStarted partitioning on disk disk2
Creating partition map
[ \ 0%................................................... ]
Partitioning encountered error on disk disk2: Resource busy (16)

After restarting the drive, I received this error:

The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer

Upon trying to Initialize the disk, Disk Utility was launched, and trying to partition there, I get the error:

Partition failed with the error:
Resource Busy

I then shut the drive enclosure down, unplugged power, switched cables, and restarted. Again I got the 'disk you inserted is not readable' error with an option to Initialize, Ignore or Eject.

Independent of what I choose, I can no longer see the disk through Terminal.

Can anyone help with this?

Dec 14, 2008 11:08 AM in response to mycatrex

I guess your problem is related to the partition table, probably it's set as MBR and you need to set it to GPT by going to Disk Utility and you should be able to sight your hard drive there sitting alone with no created volumes, select it and choose "Partition" from the right then choose "1 partition" from the drop down menu under Volume Scheme then click on "Options" below and change it from MBR (as I suppose) to GPT and then it Apply, it should work fine.

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Disk Utility Not Formatting External USB Drive