External HD Problem in Snow Leopard

Same problem here with my new ipod Toshiba hark disk Toshiba MK6006GA for the Ipod classic.
Anyone know if apple is taking some improvement on this ?

Has anyone tried booting from a Leopard DVD and using the Disk Utility from that? If I could find my bloody Leopard disk I would have tried by now.

Also happening to me with a 4gb SDHC Card via a card reader.
Worked fine in leopard, now in SL the same error message as above.

Tried using the leopard install disk utility, no luck now input/output error...

I too have the same error with SL. My drive is an external Firewire Maxtor 80GB, model number: FWRA080QV5001. After the initial "POSIX reports: The operation couldn't be completed. Cannot allocate memory." I tried to format the drive in Leopard as well as Panther and both could not format the drive. This was a previously working, mac formatted drive.

I just retried to format under 10.6.1. Same error.

I had the same problem but I followed a workaround suggestion that worked. I have an external drive enclosure and another windows based computer. I did a low level format using Windows7 and NTFS. I then took the enclosure to my MP and plugged it in. The drive utility saw the drive and I was able to put the Mac extended FS on it without error. Hope this work around helps other.

Thank you! Formatting as NTFS and then having SL erase and reformat as HFS+ worked like a charm!

Add me to the list:

I can't get my OWC external ATA drive to either format or zero-erase with SL. I would really like to avoid the whole PC workaround, since I don't have one readily available. Any fixes within Mac OS yet? Getting nervous about not having a backup of my data...

Same issue with an Iomega drive. Really frustrating, I have 1.5 TB of backups etc on the drive. It has 3 partitions, 1 FAT and 2 OSX Extended. This *****.

I just figured out how to get my MBP to recognize and format/partition/erase my external HDD. I was connecting with USB port between MBP and HDD. I was unable to unmount the drive with disk utility. I decided to go back to using my Firewire 800 port on the external HDD, and I had full functionality restored! This must be related to a USB controller problem with SL...don't know, but I'm happy my HDD is up and running again.

Well, that did the trick! I have a 500mb external drive that I use for Time Machine back up. It is connected via firewire. And I use a 120mb external for overflow that is connected via USB. The 120 is the one that kept getting the error message in question. I suppose it is some usb compatibility issue with Snow Leopard that apple will have to address. In the meantime, I swapped out the USB for a Firewire and it booted right up! Thanks so much.

I'm also having this issue. It's on a built external drive with a 1tb Seagate drive. I have 3 other externals that were all setup on Leopard and they are still working fine... it's just the new drive that I can't initialize or do anything with. I even initialized it on a MacPro with 10.5.8 and it worked fine... plugged it into the 10.6.1 machine, it mounted, but it errors while doing the time-machine backup and then says to re-initialize again.

I talked for 45min to an apple rep on the phone, and while very nice, she was unable to provide a solution to this problem.

Hopefully there will be enough issues to warrant them doing more exploration into the problem. I am convinced that it is only a Snow Leopard issue.

I had the error "Partition failed with the error: POSIX reports: The operation couldn’t be completed. Cannot allocate memory" when trying for format a WD 250 GB drive. Couldn't do using Fusion and Windows XP either. But was able to do it using another computer with 10.4 OS.

My Western Digital had issues with 10.6. I finally replaced it with a G Drive I bought at the Apple Store. It has GUID and works like a charm. My issues with the WD were basically that I couldn't boot up from it and then access my internal HD to run maintenance. (It would run ok as a device to move info back and forth.) WD tech told me WD's were not supposed to be used that way. GUID seems to play nice with 10.6, so if you can't format to it, ....

10.6 changed Firewire and, possibly, USB. Lots of people with lots of issues. My external burner will no longer work with FW (will with USB). Lots of others with similar problems, so it's not just me. Notifying Apple may help (I took my equipment to Apple Genius for a look-see. He said he would forward a report to Apple). However, 10.6.1 did not have a fix, so... ?

Message was edited by: The Dude Abides

I have a WD MyBook 1Tb which didn't work at all with USB-The disk ejected and I got the message "The disk wasn't properly ejected"... When I switched to FW it all of a sudden works fine...My conclusion is that there's a serious problem in SL with regards to USB and external harddrives. /albert SE