External HD Problem in Snow Leopard

I've got a WD Elements USB hard drive I used for Time Machine on a Mac OS 10.6 machine. Worked fine until a few days ago. Now I get the dick utility error about memory allocation.
I've tried absolutely everything in this thread -partitions, terminal, etc. and a couple of other things I found elsewhere - Nada! Nothing works
I've got a Windoz machine but it can't find the drive and I'm a Windoz idiot and don't want to try that any more. Two other Apple machines but all are 10.6 so no help. . Sure looks like a Snow Leopard issue. Wake up Apple. We need some help here.

Can I remind those who are asking Apple to wake up: Use the "Contact us" at the bottom of this page & navigate to the lower part of the 3rd column. Choose what seems the appropriate address and post your concerns there. These contacts are checked by Apple techs and they will usually include a correction in an update posted some time later if they can find the bug. If the issue is with 3rd-party drivers, etc, Apple will usually negotiate with the 3rd-party to provide a software update through their own support pages.

These discussion pages are primarily for users to share their experiences and possible solutions with each other. Fortunately many problems receive workable solutions in these pages - but not all.

Neville

hi
I had the same issues with an older 60gb Lacie drive (blue face) I thought because I hadn't used it for a while and it had stopped working.. But I formatted it on another machine with Tiger and it's fine.. even now mounts on my new macbook pro.. weird huh?

I can confirm that fix.

Newer Technologies external drive. Worked fine on 10.4 and 10.5, but Snow Leopard failed to initialize it via USB. Hooked the drive up via Firewire and the reformat went along without a hitch. Success.

Come on Apple, fix your USB drivers! (By the way, this problem is also on Snow Leopard Server as well)

The command line tools didn't work either... they just use the same tool that the Disk Utility GUI uses...even tried a bunch of flavors of the command.

Plugging the drive in via firewire did allow me to re-format it and got it working.

I can confirm that the above (command line options) fails to work on 2 different machines (Snow Leopard and Snow Leopard Server).

Add me to the list of people who have run into this issue. In fact, after googling "POSIX reports: The operation couldn't be completed. Cannot allocate memory." I found this thread.

Fortunately I had a somewhat recent SuperDuper backup of the external drive in question, so I didn't loose too much data. It was an inconvenient loss, but no where near catastrophic.

After receiving the initial error message in snow leopard saying that the "Disk could not be initialized" and allot of fumbling with the external drive, unplugging and re plugging back in & rebooting my MBP all to no avail. I decided to wipe the drive and start over.

This is where I then ran into the "POSIX reports: The operation couldn't be completed. Cannot allocate memory." while trying to erase this drive in disk utility. I then decided to boot into my Windows XP partition with boot camp and try my luck with the Computer Management utility in Administrator Tools (Start>Control Panel>Administrator Tools>Disk Management.)

I then successfully initialized the external drive and formatted the drive in NTFS.

The drive was operational and reported "Healthy" by Windows Disk Management.

I then booted back into 10.6.2 and the drive mounted correctly as a NTFS drive. I then attempted to format the external drive in Disk Utility with a HFS+ format and once again received the "POSIX reports: The operation couldn't be completed. Cannot allocate memory."

I then came to the conclusion this had to be a issue/bug/fault in the 10.6.2 OS X.

I then booted back into Windows XP on Bootcamp (I never thought I would see the day that I would be using a 9+ year old Microsoft Operating system to diagnose an bug with apple’s most current OS release, but I digress).
After repeating the reformatting of the external disk with windows Disk Management utility I decided to try something different.

I then booted off my old OS X 10.5.7 installation off of yet another external drive. So now at this point I am running OSX 10.5.7 from a external drive on a 2008 unibody MBP.

I then plugged in the “problematic” external drive that kept giving me the "POSIX reports: The operation couldn't be completed. Cannot allocate memory." error under OS X 10.6.2

I opened disk utility under 10.5.7 and was able to successfully format the “problematic” drive from NTFS to HSF+ with no issues.

After that I booted back into 10.6.2 and this “problematic” drive then initialized and mounted WITHOUT ISSUE.

As many of you posting in this thread know, "POSIX reports: The operation couldn't be completed. Cannot allocate memory." is a MAJOR flaw in OSX 10.6.X and need to be corrected immediately.

I urge you all to take the advice given earlier in this thread and contact Apple to point out this glaring fault in the current release of the OS X operating system.

I hope this post is able to help fellow 10.6 users having this issue.

I hit the same snag: "POSIX reports: The operation couldn't be completed. Cannot allocate memory" when trying to erase or partition an external USB drive using the disk utility in Snow Leopard. It didn't matter what options I chose: HFS, journaled, FAT, or even just erase.

I don't think it's an issue with the drive or with windows-only drivers, as I pulled the disk from a dell laptop running Ubuntu and the drive was formated to EXT3 and ran pure linux fine for the last couple years. I installed the drive into an 'other world computing' external enclosure to retire it to a time machine backup drive and encountered the error trying to reformat. The enclosure supports both USB and Firewire, and the disk utility ran fine when I switched from USB to firewire (400).

The hardware is:
iMac 4,1 1.83 GHz Core Duo, 2G ram running Snow Leopard 10.6.2, with a recent reboot and the latest patches
The drive is a Western Digital 'scorpio' 250G 2.5" WD2500BEVE (older style ide/PATA)
The enclosure is a OWC mercury 'on-the-go' clear enclosure, dual interface (USB2/fw400).

Since I've successfully formated the drive I no longer have a 'problem', but thought the extra details (and my work-around) might help others and maybe resolve the issue.

Hey there. My first post to Discussions although I have been reading here for years. Just wanted to share what worked for me.

The drive: LaCie Little disk 500 GB(the black one).

Worked fine until installing Snow Leopard, then I could read only(which is better than most), but not write data. Can't remember the specific error, as i just thought I'd reformat after backing up, no big deal.

I backed everything up, and it wasn't until trying to reformat i came upon the error on this board. I tried zeroing out data, which seemed to be working for 20 mins, then I got the dreaded POSIX error and there was no partition to mount. ARGH!!

so, I grabbed my wife's macbook, still running Panther(!) 10.3.9. I tried to reformat as Jornaled/extended, but got an error. then, remembering something i read here, i reformatted as MS-DOS, and it erased right away. next, i reformatted again as mac J/E still in Panther.

Lastly, I bought the disk back to Snow Leopard, and erased it one more time, as suggested on the LaCie site here:

http://www.lacie.com/support/faq/faq.htm?faqid=10685

thanks for everyone's help on this topic... so far everything is behaving great. It's even copying files much faster.

same here: no initialising or partitioning (Journaled, case sensitive, GUID)
: "POSIX reports: The operation couldn't be completed. Cannot allocate memory"
On a disk that had previously worked without problems.
It happened on a Mac mini 2009 (Macmini3,1) 2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB Ram
with Mac OS X Server 10.6.2 (10C540)
The problem disk is a Western Digital, 250 GB (from 2004) in an external Combo USB/firewire enclosure with a prolific chipset. During the problem it was USB-connected.

I moved the disk to an iMac (OSX 10.6.2) and coupled the enclosure on firewire400. Partitioning and erasing was no problem at all then. For safety I then ran Speedtools Media Scanner 2.3.1 on it, which detected and fixed one bad sector. Then I replugged the formatted drive back to the mac mini and timemachine backup worked on it without problems.
The disk:
Capacity: 250,06 GB (250.059.350.528 bytes)
Removable Media: Yes
Detachable Drive: Yes
BSD Name: disk1
Product ID: 0x3507
Vendor ID: 0x067b (Prolific Technology, Inc.)
Version: 1.00
Speed: Up to 480 Mb/sec
Manufacturer: Prolific Technology Inc.
Location ID: 0x26400000
Current Available (mA): 500
Current Required (mA): 100
Partition Map Type: GPT (GUID Partition Table)
S.M.A.R.T. status: Not Supported
Volumes: ...
Capacity: 249,72 GB (249.715.376.128 bytes)
Available: 248,99 GB (248.988.454.912 bytes)
Writable: Yes
File System: Case-Sensitive Journaled HFS+
BSD Name: disk1s2

The problem pattern seems to me Snow Leopard + USB
The fix was Snow Leopard 10.6.2 + firewire.

Greetings

Sorry, I have no solution so read on if you want to understand the symptoms I have.

----
This is a long thread so please forgive me if the perspective I am about to offer has already been addressed or noted. I have yet to read this entire post for more insight, or that is my hope anyway.


Let me explain what happened to me.

I have an external USB drive from a reputable company, it's a 500GB drive and I too am running Mac OS X 10.6.2.

Suddenly, for no reason that I can determine Mac OS offered this message to me while I was doing something else on the computer not related to the external drive…
"The disk was not ejected properly. If possible, always eject a disk before unplugging it or turning it off. To eject a disk, select it in Finder and choose File > Eject. The next time you connect the disk, Mac OS X will attempt to repair any damage to the information on the disk."

---
Symptoms
The disk doesn't appear on the desktop not a Finder sidebar. It does appear in Disk Utility, but only a volume measuring 12.78GB (but this is a 500GB drive), the partition map scheme is displayed as unformatted and the Write Status is read write. If I try to unmount the drive using disk utility it automatically mounts again.

The other oddity is that the First Aid's Verify Disk Permissions, Repair Disk Permissions, Verify Disk and Repair Disk are all grayed out.

When trying to erase the drive, the logs spews this out…

30/01/2010 22:36:49 /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app/Contents/MacOS/Disk Utility[11418] FIXME: IOUnserialize has detected a string that is not valid UTF-8, "y?".
30/01/2010 22:36:49 /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app/Contents/MacOS/Disk Utility[11418] FIXME: IOUnserialize has detected a string that is not valid UTF-8, "y?".
30/01/2010 22:36:51 /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app/Contents/MacOS/Disk Utility[11418] FIXME: IOUnserialize has detected a string that is not valid UTF-8, "y?".
30/01/2010 22:36:51 /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app/Contents/MacOS/Disk Utility[11418] FIXME: IOUnserialize has detected a string that is not valid UTF-8, "y?".
30/01/2010 22:36:52 /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app/Contents/MacOS/Disk Utility[11418] FIXME: IOUnserialize has detected a string that is not valid UTF-8, "y?".
30/01/2010 22:36:52 /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app/Contents/MacOS/Disk Utility[11418] FIXME: IOUnserialize has detected a string that is not valid UTF-8, "y?".
30/01/2010 22:36:52 /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app/Contents/MacOS/Disk Utility[11418] FIXME: IOUnserialize has detected a string that is not valid UTF-8, "y?".
30/01/2010 22:36:52 /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app/Contents/MacOS/Disk Utility[11418] FIXME: IOUnserialize has detected a string that is not valid UTF-8, "y?".
30/01/2010 22:36:52 /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app/Contents/MacOS/Disk Utility[11418] FIXME: IOUnserialize has detected a string that is not valid UTF-8, "y?".
30/01/2010 22:36:52 /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app/Contents/MacOS/Disk Utility[11418] FIXME: IOUnserialize has detected a string that is not valid UTF-8, "y?".
30/01/2010 22:36:52 /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app/Contents/MacOS/Disk Utility[11418] FIXME: IOUnserialize has detected a string that is not valid UTF-8, "y?".
30/01/2010 22:36:52 /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app/Contents/MacOS/Disk Utility[11418] FIXME: IOUnserialize has detected a string that is not valid UTF-8, "y?".
30/01/2010 22:36:53 /usr/sbin/diskmanagementd[11421] FIXME: IOUnserialize has detected a string that is not valid UTF-8, "y?".
30/01/2010 22:36:53 /usr/sbin/diskmanagementd[11421] FIXME: IOUnserialize has detected a string that is not valid UTF-8, "y?".
30/01/2010 22:36:53 kernel disk6: I/O error.
30/01/2010 22:36:54 /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app/Contents/MacOS/Disk Utility[11418] FIXME: IOUnserialize has detected a string that is not valid UTF-8, "y?".
30/01/2010 22:36:54 /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app/Contents/MacOS/Disk Utility[11418] FIXME: IOUnserialize has detected a string that is not valid UTF-8, "y?".
30/01/2010 22:36:54 /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app/Contents/MacOS/Disk Utility[11418] FIXME: IOUnserialize has detected a string that is not valid UTF-8, "y?".
30/01/2010 22:36:54 /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app/Contents/MacOS/Disk Utility[11418] FIXME: IOUnserialize has detected a string that is not valid UTF-8, "y?".
30/01/2010 22:36:54 /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app/Contents/MacOS/Disk Utility[11418] FIXME: IOUnserialize has detected a string that is not valid UTF-8, "y?".
30/01/2010 22:36:54 /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app/Contents/MacOS/Disk Utility[11418] FIXME: IOUnserialize has detected a string that is not valid UTF-8, "y?".
30/01/2010 22:36:55 /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app/Contents/MacOS/Disk Utility[11418] FIXME: IOUnserialize has detected a string that is not valid UTF-8, "y?".
30/01/2010 22:36:55 /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app/Contents/MacOS/Disk Utility[11418] FIXME: IOUnserialize has detected a string that is not valid UTF-8, "y?".



The drive is connected directly to the mac, not through a hub.

---

I have not yet restarted my mac though. I'll report back when I do but can't now.

Basically, using the Erase tab in disk utility will not allow me to format the drive…I get the same error posted in the original message for this thread.

Now that I add my observations, I will read this thread and see what else others here have offered.

PS, I believe something is wrong with the enclosure or the drive…not the OS - it continues to work as expected without issue.

Count me among the stricken; I just noticed my time machine has not worked for a week. Trying to reformat (i.e. all I could think of with disk utility) "POSIX reports: The operation couldn’t be completed. Cannot allocate memory". I am using a SAMSUNG HD103UJ Media 1TB drive for time machine in my Mac Pro 2 X 2.66 Ghz with 10.6.2. I am wondering if Apple ever corrects this if my time machine data will still be there (I doubt it). At least it isn't the drive, right?

It works !! very well

I used this command on "MAXTOR S TM3160215A" and was so fast but with a single problem mounting the disk.(my example)

$ diskutil eraseVolume HFS+ Diskname /dev/disk2
Unmounting disk
Erasing
Initialized /dev/rdisk2 as a 149 GB HFS Plus volume
Mounting disk
Could not mount disk2 with name Diskname after erase
Finished erase on disk2 Diskname

After that I mounted using "Disk Utility" and it works.

Thanks a lot I don't understand why Apple does not fix this Disk Utility issue

I had the same problem like all of you guys.... I tried all the steps above, terminal blablah...NOTHING worked, so here is what worked for me:

Problem: I wanted to format my IDE disk to hfs+ using disc utility.
Error:
POSIX reports: The operation couldn't be completed. Cannot allocate memory.


After that I started VMWARE Fusion /Windows XP
connected my disk to xp and formated it with Partition Manager 7.0 as an fat32 disk!

Pls. Note that I had to use Partition Manager, because XP just wanted to format the drive as NTFS ...I don´t know why.......

So after I formated the disk, 1partition!
I reconnected the disk from XP and connected with OSX.... I could see my disk (fat32) on my mac...I also could read and write on it.
Still if I tried to format it again with disc utility...problem occurred again....

so I googled a lot...and I mean a lot.
My USB drive does not have an extra firewire connection....which some people state that this should solve the problem.


accidentally , but luckily I found that page:
http://db.tidbits.com/article/10618

it says somewhere "Remove the drive and put it into another enclosure, preferably one with a FireWire interface." I was sure my girlfriend had one....but after I got the enclosure from here, I realized that it has no firewire, just the normal USB!

still i thought, it might be a at least an idea just to put the drive in my girlfriends enclosure ...and give it try....and...what should I say???

IT WORKED!

I could directly format it again using disc utility.....



the drive was meant to be my Time machine backup...so i made a backup with still in the enclosure of my girlfriend...after backup stopped, I replace the disk with the original enclosure...and it still worked!

I really hope to help someone out there.


cheers danny

I think you are right to suspect the enclosure…I mean in your case that solved it. I am not surprised that it was the enclosure, however, I found it interesting that you were able to erase the drive using Windows.

Could you let us know if after erasing the drive in Windows you could see the volume as mounted on your desktop.

This is the second drive I have by a 'reputable' manufacturer die on me and I suspect the enclose and not the drive.

Thanks for the information.

For what it's worth I did find this article, http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050302225659382

You can find the article above if you google search, Recover a dead hard drive using dd.

Take care and thanks for chiming back.
alex