External HD Problem in Snow Leopard

One more case of this problem. Just as everyone else... it really seems a SL bug.

Just so Apple realizes the problem here, I will not be upgrading my prepress workstation or my coworkers systems to SL until this problem is resolved as I cannot afford having data loss like I did on my home system. This problem is happening to my internal SATA drive as I wrote in a previous post. It is definitely a Snow Leopard issue and is unacceptable.

BTW: Another issue, ever since I installed Snow Leopard on my MacPro there has been a high frequency/pitch whine polluting my office. I believe it to be maybe a small fan on a processor... I have yet to pin point it. Annoying.

I had hoped that 10.6.1 would have resolved this issue, but either it is more difficult to solve, time-wise, or it has a lower priority than we would like. Maybe 10.6.2? I agree, very annoying (the connectivity, not the whine of a fan), when they had more than half a year in Beta and all they had to do was plug in various Firewire and USB peripherals to see if they worked when they decided to "streamline" connectivity.

You can add yet another person with the same issue. Posix reports: The operation couldn't be completed. Cannot allocate memory.

Mac Mini with 10.6.1 (Snow Leopard)
Western Digital external USB disk (160gb)
2gb RAM

Drive was previously formatted under Mac OS (Leopard) (Mac OS Extended (Journaled))

Cannot format under Snow Leopard but can format under Boot Camp Windows XP.

APPLE: YOU HAVE A PROBLEM HERE!!!!!!!

Same problem, original MacBook Hitachi (now in a dual USB 2.0 enclosure).

Hi. I'm not exactly sure how you can "switch" to Firewire. What kind of cable/converter would I need to hook up my USB 2.0 external hard drive (Fantom Drives Green Drive) to my Macbrook pro?

What? Why would you want to switch to Firewire NOW? It's become problematic. Besides which, you CAN"T just "switch" USB to FW. Apples to steel wool. If a machine uses both, you can just swap cables, which almost always come with the machine. If your machine is only USB, you gonna use USB.

Sent feedback on this to Apple, but in the meantime wonder if anyone else has a workaround for my requirement?

I have a couple of 2TB Seagate ST320005 6XW0 drives which I want to bind together in a mirror set, have used this before and doesn't work now.

Like others I could successfully format these drives under windows using NTFS and quick format, then re-initialize them under MAC OS extended (journalled). Trouble is I REALLY want them mirrored, as soon as you try and create a mirror set, disk utility dismounts the drives and tries to partition them itself, that's where it fails.

Seemingly re-formatting a drive that windows has already partitioned isn't a big deal, but as soon as SL tries to re-partition itself it breaks. Highly doubt that windows disk manager will partition my mac mirror set for me!

Error message was:
*
Creating RAID set failed with the error:

POSIX reports: The operation couldn’t be completed. Cannot allocate memory
*

Need this fixed as previous set broke and limping along trying to get data back on a decent performing set-up!

Message was edited by: ukrunr

I had the same POSIX memory allocation problem.

EASY SOLUTION (worked for me as well):

Erase drive with a different machine with Tiger installed. Leopard didn't do it, but Tiger did.

Definite bug that needs to be fixed.

Good luck!
Marc

Fortunately I still have an iMac that runs tiger 10.4.11 to be precise.

Unfortunately when hooking up the Seagate drives and trying to partition on Tiger, I get the I/O error mentioned elsewhere. So, not sure how you managed to get Tiger to work for you - maybe you're not on 10.4.11?

BTW - This is getting ridiculous, here I am concerned about my work/data so I take great precautions to back up data, then when a disk system fails, I have my backups but still can't recover the data to a new target drive, it's no good to me on my time machine backup if I can't recover it!

Reported this to Apple, a response/fix won't come soon enough, but looks like it won't come at all as it appears to go back to Tiger as well as Leopard and SL. I'm sure my windows based colleagues are now mocking me...

Guess I needed to play a little more. Turns out under 10.4.11 I get an I/O error when selecting a single partition with GUID table, but if I select apple partition map it actually works (well, at least it initializes).

Subsequently copying some data results in a random file transfer error (code=-36), totally random at which point this fails during transfer, always a different file. What a massive pain.

I just got an Edge10 DAS200 USB raid housing. I fitted it out with 2 1TB disks in a mirrored configuration. I then tried to partition them using two of my macs. I received a Partition Failed: Resource Busy problem on 10.5.8 on a G4 MacMini and Partition Failed: Cannot Allocate Memory on an Intel based MacBookPro running 10.6.1

Installed parallels, created a windows volume, installed windows then got an evaluation of MacDrive, and partitioned and formatted the volume successfully.

Now I can use my Edge10 DAS200 mirrored 1TB external USB array with my MacMini G4 and MacBookPro.

It's an absolute failure from Apple's part that users like us have to waste time going back to windows to get hardware to work.

I've just spent 8 hours of searching, installing and general frustration and I ask Apple Why???? I find it fitting and humiliating for Apple that I had to go to a windows setup to fix this.

I encountered the same problem when I tried to reformat a replacement drive in a USB mounted jbod box. It would 'see' the drive, but would not partition it. I finally solved the problem by taking it over to a Mac Mini that I use as a printer driver box and is still running on 10.4. That computer formatted the disk fine and now it can be used on my 10.6 Mac Pro.

An even weirder problem is that this box also has an eSATA connection, and when I hook it up to my Sonnet eSATA card, Finder 'sees' the drives twice - it mounts each drive as both an eSATA drive and a USB drive. Needless to say, I am a little worried about which mount point is the correct one. Strangely, if it is just hooked to the USB port, it only mounts the disk once. I have an eSATA-port-only RAID 0 box mounted on the same card that behaves fine.

Apple has some work to do on this external storage issue with Snow Leopard.

Add me to the list. I opened a brand new 750GB Seagate drive and got the following error when I tried to format it on my 17" latest generation MacBook Pro:
POSIX reports: The operation couldn’t be completed. Cannot allocate memory
I returned the drive at my expense to Seagate telling them it was faulty and today received a "new" factory certified drive as a replacement - it too has the same problem 😟. So today I look in these forums and note the proposal about doing the format on an older Mac. The only other machine I have is a PowerBook G4 running 10.5.7 and nothing there can format it either - via USB. So I tried doing it via firewire on the PowerBook (I only have FW400 cables) and it worked!
Just for giggles, I then connected it back to the MacBook Pro via USB and it mounted just fine. I then tried to format it on the MacBook Pro and just got the same error again (expected that I guess).

Anyway, I'm convinced this is Apple's problem...

Geez, add me to the growing list. I installed snow leopard on my macbook pro and it has been working great after I figured out the battery problems. So I decided to upgrade my mac pro. I have an external cool drives JBOD that is a total of 2TB and hooked up via esata, it can be seen but with no partitions. It looks the same with firewire. Unfortunately it has no firewire connections. This is the drive I have been using for time machine.

Has apple even acknowledged the problem yet?

Also, since the upgrade I keep getting the black screen of death in multiple languages. Everything just locks up and requires a forced power down.

It seems to be worse when I have any estata drive turned on. So I am thinking it is related. But there have been a time or two the drives have been off and it still happens. It seems snow leopard might have been a mistake.

And now apple has a BSOD just like microsoft. Sad....

Mike