External HD Problem in Snow Leopard

had the same issue - only way for me was to fire up the PC, install "macdrive", format the drive and use it happy ever after on the mac... 10 minutes, macdrive worked fine as trial version

Hello,

my name is Walter, I'm from Berlin. I had the same problem on my MBP 17" 2.6 from April 2008. I made many replacements of HD's but the last three week I was near to get crazy.

I also get this message:

+POSIX report: The operation couldn't complete+
+Cannot allocate memory+

I thought the the new hard disks are damaged, but today I replaced the third HD and the problem was the same. So I asked some users of the german MacTechNews and there I get the information about this discussion on Apple's website.

I couldn't find a solution, only that the problem could be on SnowLeopard. So I called the german Apple-support. He was very friendly and we talked about the problem. Apple knows about the problem and he told me to do two important things before the replacement:

*1.) SMP-reset*

My MBP is from April 2008, so I can get out the battery. To do the SMP-reset shut down the computer, get out the battery and press the power button for 10-15 seconds. The get the battery back.

*2.) PRAM-reset*

After SMP-reset get in the battery and press the following keys on your keyboard: _*P R alt cmd_*
While you press this four keys, press the power button to start the computer. You have to press these four keys _*so long as you Mac makes two times the start tone.*_

So you made the SMP- & PRAM-reset. These two methods set the hardware drivers back. These drivers are the problem for the POSIX report under Snow Leopard.

After this I could replace, formate and backup my new WD BlackScorpio 500GB in 1 hour.

I hope this solution will help and I also hope that Apple will inform users about the problem. I don't know how this work on unibody MB/MBP 'cause you can not replace the battery for a SMP-reset. Maybe this is only a problem of "older" Books. But I think it is a problem of SnowLeopard.

Best regards from Berlin
Walter

PS: don't be worry about my bad english 😉

Apple needs to respond to this problem quickly. I have been working with computers for almost 30 years and never seen such a prolific issue. This is clearly O/S related. I get the posix errors reported here when installing a brand new internal drive. Other windows PC's can see / format / partition this drive, only Mac O/S can't.

This is why mac's will never gain the acceptance PC's already have....very sad situation.

Hi,

have you done the SMP-and PRAM-reset? I made it and that worked. I also see OS Snow Leopard as the problem for the POSIX-report, I never had problems like this and made many replacements.
Greets from Berlin

Hi I am having the same problem.

my hard drive died so needed to replace it. got a new hard drive Toshiba mk5065gsx.

I have a mbp 13inch and can not take out the battery. tried what you have said but has not worked. however tried it with the new hard drive not the old one. any other suggestions? i am using snow leopard and bought my mbp in october 2009

Do you have the possibility to to install 10.5 Tiger? If you have a Tiger-DVD -maybe from a friend-

1.) make a backup with Time-Machine
2.) replace your new HDD
3.) use the 10.5 Tiger DVD and use "hard-disk-utility" to format or partition your new drive and then install Tiger 10.5
4.) after finish installation of Tiger - use your SnowLeo DVD to upgrade on SnowLeo 10.6

This is the easiest way if you can use a Tiger-DVD and can not use the SMP reset. I got this tip from a Apple-support member in Germany.

Hope that helps....

Message was edited by: vewia

Tiger is not 10.5. Tiger is 10.4. Leopard is 10.5 and Snow Leopard is 10.6. You might want to get your versions correct here.


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Allan


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I am sorry - that's right: not Tiger - Leopard!

I resolved this issue by connecting my external drive via eSATA instead of USB. Couldn't partition the drive when it was connected via USB. But, when I connected it via eSATA, no problem. Glad the drive enclosure had both!

I have the same problems: Snow Leopard, MBPro 17 unibody, but this is with a Firewire 800 connection to a LaCie Quadra 1TB. Exact same problem/message trying to partition it. One different thing (though it should not matter) - I am running PGP WDE (Whole Disk Encryption) on the drive. Partitioned it originally in Leopard (I think) with 2 partitions, but forgot to specify GUID partitioning. Backed it up yesterday, and tried to repartition and got this message.

Am at the Genius bar now waiting to see if they can try the eSata approach; the drive has the port, but I need an ExpressCard/34 eSata adapter. Will let all know if I am successful.

So, the Genius Bar guy hooked up the LaCie drive to a white Macbook running Snow Leopard (10.6.6) with all recent patches (as am I), and it partitioned with no problems at all. I'm restoring to the drive now at home with the GUID partition table set.

The support guy said he would suspect the chipset on particular models of MBPros, possibly. Wish I'd thought to try it on another MBPro 17 at work today...?

Forgot to mention - he had to use a USB cable for the Macbook since it has no Firewire. He also said they format/partition drives all day long on Macbook Pros in Snow Leopard (but no 17" ones). I suggest that anyone with this problem take it to the Genius bar and bring your machine, with the browser open to this discussion group and plead for help.

I recently experience this problem with a couple external USB connected hard drives. After finding no help here on the discussions, I turned to Google for more results and found the following page on CNET.com

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10430235-263.html

The command listed in step 1 "diskutil eraseVolume HFS+ NAME IDENTIFIER" works like a champ for me. It took about 10 minutes for a 500.11GB Seagate ST350063 0A.

I know this post is old, but I've got exactly the same problem, but NOT ONE SINGLE solution in this entire thread has worked, my external HD shows up in Disk Utility but with no volume, so I need to 'initialize' the disk or just format it but it never works, I've tried Disk Utility , Terminal, Third party software. Nothing works. I don't want to throw a 2Tb external portable hard drive away! Anybody have any suggestions?!

Posting at the bottom of a post which is marked solved is not the best way to get your question noticed. I would suggest you start your own post. If you feel it would be helpful to your question, you can state that you have done the here in this post without any success.


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Allan


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