External HD Problem in Snow Leopard

USE UNBUNTU 10.4, then go to administration, click on system, then erase the boot record, then format your drive as GUID. it may give you an error message, don't stress it at all. hit power to quit ubuntu, eject ubuntu insert SN restart your system and install SN on your mac. SIMPLE!!

May 28, 2011 and STILL having this problem.

I have 3 external hard drives: a La Cie Quadra D2, a Disk GO, and an older LaCie -- all were my back ups - one was a daily, and two were drag and drops - dating back to 1997 when I went freelance as a book designer.

One by one this week, ALL THREE DRIVES are unusuable and UNMOUNTABLE -- this is a DISASTER.

I lost 15 years worth of work -- at this point all I have left is the iMac itself with current work of 3 years which I can "live" with but bad news for clients whose books I have designed prior to that.

Each time the drive just "disapeared" or would not mount on start up; I tried USB and firewire for the one that has firewire, I tried the dis util in Terminal, I tried Disk Utility, and I tried using a PC - NOTHING works. PC gave error "could not complete formatting", Disk Utili gave errors.

I bought a new 1 TB drive tonight and am going to tackle this in the morning, Sunday - and see if it shows up so i can can have SOME type of back up - I use 10.6.7 and upgraded to the combo update package and STILL no luck as of yet.

This is SCARY, and distressing.

Does ANYone know what is going on with external hard drives and Snow Leopard?

I dont' have any computers with earlier software than 10.5.8 and none of the drives show up there either, on my power book.

You have to boot into 32bit to stop running into problems. I used to do it all the time loading up windows formatted drives.

Simple.

🙂

I don't understand - I am not using and windows formatted drive. All three drives were used on my Mac and stopped showing up and are unreadable this week. Using Snow Leopard 10.6.7 and lost three drives this week, none mount, none will initialize or format in disk utillity, terminal commands, or on a pc.

Just encountered this error with my grandson who is using a MacBook and I have an iMac 24", both on OS 10.6.7. He wanted to erase an Iomega HD 120GB when the error arose, and we got nowhere using Disc Utility. Google showed we were not alone but we did not find a solution. As last resort connected the hard disc to an older MacBook running 10.4.11 and the problem was solved allowing erasure of the disc which then worked normally with Snow Leopard.

It would make this forum easier to use if links to the "Correct Answers" were provided as on this thread there are 16 pages to wade through.

This is just to add that I have the same arror with a LaCie external firewire drive which worked OK originally with Snow Leopard on my iMAC.

Add me to the list, too. Managed to use my Iomega backup drive once and then it said it needed to be reformatted. Finally bit the bullet and decided to reformat, only to get the error:

POSIX reports: The operation couldn’t be completed. Resource busy

I've had my Macbook Pro into the genius bar for the past 6 months with issues (from memory, to weird sounds, to failed backup) and I keep being told there is nothing wrong. Wish I could get a straight answer.

This is incredibly disheartening to read.

I have a 1.5TB Seagate Freeagent drive that I've had plugged in to my Airport and have been backing up to for just over a year. Time Machine has been unable to back up recently because the back up file had become HUGE (I only had about 500GB of data stored on the drive).

I could NOT erase the backup file, and I read on the forums that I had to erase the drive in order to eradicate the backup file and make the drive usable again for backups.

I erased the disk in Disk Utility, formatted for Journaled, and a full day later had the error: "POSIX reports: The operation couldn’t be completed. Operation not permitted."

Fortunately, I ran into a killer sale on a 2TB USB drive and had moved my data files to this drive before attempting to format the Freeagent, so I didn't lose any data, but am just nervous about trusting Time Machine to run backups effectively so I'm not in the same position again...oh, and there's the pesky issue of having a $200 electronic paperweight on my desk, since my 1.5TB drive has just been rendered useless.

There must be SOME fix for this issue...

This is indeed distressing. ALL THREE of my drives for back up went unrecognizable within a week.

LaCie replaced one still under warranty; the other two were older and are now trash. They cannot be formatted by either mac or PC stystems with any operating system and i get the same POSIX error message.

I lost six months worth of work even though it was TRIPLE back up since all three drives went.

I have three drives now, the LaCie replacement and I bought two WD externals and am doing triple back up again but what is going to STOP this disaster from happening again?

And what is causing it?

We tried everything from formatting, to partioning, to erasing, by all means possible, with interface and via the terminal - the disks just stopped mounting or being recognized.

Does Apple have ANYTHING to say on this AT ALL???

Formatting the disk via MacDrive on a Windows machine just worked for me to fix the issue.

Glad to hear it EarthMother.

We tried that on a couple PCs and it said "problem formatting".

Nothing worked and I mean NOTHING. Worked on it for days on 3 macs and 2 PCs and trying every suggesion we found on the internet.

I didn't try the 10.6 boot cd, but finally got my 1Tb Seagate Freeloader - uh whatever - to reformat by mounting the disk to Windows 7 (32bit under VMware), using Computer Management::Disk Management to delete and then create an NTFS partition. Then, back attached to Snow Leopard, re-partition to 1 partition, creating an HFS+ partition. Voila!

This only works if you have some Windows machine somewhere (I try not to, but since I work at Microsoft, that's getting harder :^).

We got as far as mounting in on a Winodow computer, and deleting the partitioin, but when we went to format it, it gave error "trouble formatting disk".