How long to format external hard drive?

Question

Level 1

30 points

How long to format external hard drive?

I'm planing to use a 750GB Western Digital myBook external drive as my backup drive for Time Machine. I am using Disk Utility to format the drive as a Mac OS External (Journaled) volume. The drive has been formating for nearly 10 hours now, which seems to be way too long. There is a message next to the progress bar which reads "newfs_hfs: /dev/rdisk2s1: partition size not a multiple of 4K." I thought I would close Disk Utility and retry, but I got a warning not to interrupt an operation in progress.

Should I force quit the Disk Utility, or should I wait it out a little longer? And, in layman's terms, what does the message mean?

iMac 2 GHz Intel Core Duo, Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Posted on Feb 1, 2008 4:46 AM

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Answer 1

drdocument

Level 4

3,019 points

Feb 1, 2008 4:54 AM in response to Jim J

There are a number of reports here in the discussions of problems with WD myBook drives. Search for "myBook" and check them out. You'll probably find a solution.

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Answer 2

nkh

Level 1

82 points

Feb 1, 2008 5:28 AM in response to Jim J

I had no difficulty in formatting a 500GB MyBook. Went to Finder and opened Disk Utility. Select the WD drive in left panel. Click on "Erase" in tab at top (of course, this removes anything already on the drive) and then select Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Time should be very short to completion.

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Answer 3

Feb 1, 2008 6:59 AM in response to Jim J

Don't want to rain on your parade, but I tried a My Book yesterday and never did get it to work. Returned it and got Maxtor One Touch 4 Plus. It's backing up now. I know some people have the WD, but it simply wouldn't work for me.
Took about 2 seconds to format with disk utility. Did Apple Partition Map since I have PPC.

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Answer 4

Jim J Author

Level 1

30 points

Feb 1, 2008 7:13 AM in response to Jim J

Ok, I did a little research and discovered that WD drives have problems being formatted with Disk Utility. I downloaded and installed a program called MacDrive 7 (it has a 5 day free trial). It's a Windows program, so I booted into Windows and was able to format the WD myBook as a Mac OS volume. Took 40 seconds! Time Machine is backing up my system on the WD drive as I am typing this. Don't know if I'm allowed to post links, but a search of MacDrive will easily get you to the program. Hope this helps anyone else who has problems with the WD drives.

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Answer 5

Feb 1, 2008 7:26 AM in response to Jim J

The other problem I had with the WD was that it wouldn't mount the disc image on the desktop with firewire, only usb. I could have had a bad drive.

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Answer 6

Monty1945

Level 3

694 points

Feb 1, 2008 7:41 AM in response to Jim J

Greetings,

I bought 2 750 MyBook drives from WD and they were each set to a GUID partition scheme and each was partitioned in to two separate partitions.

They formatted in seconds and are being used for Time machine, as well as other things. I used Leopards Disk Utility. It's strange how it works for some and not for others.

It's good to hear that you got it taken care of.

Cheers,
M.
***********

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Answer 7

Feb 18, 2008 9:25 PM in response to Jim J

This same topic was solved on another forum here, and the fix worked well for me step-by-step:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6425429

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