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Monterey won't reformat Hard Drive

I have a multiple external hard drives (4TB Seagate, 4TB WD) that I tried to erase to APFS, but since I've installed Monterey I see that it only recognizes 1.8TB. Has there been a fix out there? I see hundreds of people with the same issue and no fix in sight.

Posted on Nov 24, 2022 9:32 AM

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Posted on Nov 24, 2022 10:48 AM

I was suggesting that you stay away from third party drive firmware or tools, those usually make these things worse.


I believe you can remove a Time Machine drive from Time Machine without the drive being physically connected at the time (I could be wrong ...)


Have you tried, after removing all Time Machine links to the drive(s), erasing the drive at the physical device level? In Disk Utility select in View Show All Devices and erase/format at the Device level (the physical entire drive, not individual volumes or partitions). Have you tried this in Safe Mode (if not working normally)?

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Nov 24, 2022 10:48 AM in response to datahoarder

I was suggesting that you stay away from third party drive firmware or tools, those usually make these things worse.


I believe you can remove a Time Machine drive from Time Machine without the drive being physically connected at the time (I could be wrong ...)


Have you tried, after removing all Time Machine links to the drive(s), erasing the drive at the physical device level? In Disk Utility select in View Show All Devices and erase/format at the Device level (the physical entire drive, not individual volumes or partitions). Have you tried this in Safe Mode (if not working normally)?

Nov 24, 2022 10:10 AM in response to datahoarder

Have you tried first to format/erase to GUID/HFS+? Then if that works, try erase/format to APFS?


Do you have Seagate proprietary disk software/firmware installed? That software comes with those drives, most Mac users don't make use of it since Disk Utility is the best way to manage external drives.


Have you been using the external drives as Time Machine drives? Time Machine drives must first be removed as backup destinations in Time Machine before erasing/formatting.

Nov 24, 2022 10:27 AM in response to steve626

One of them was a time machine drive, one was not. When I tried opening it the first time since updating to Monterey it wasn't even recognizing the disk anymore but I saw it in disk utility. So I unfortunately had to try reformatting it bc Time Machine & the Mac couldn't even see it to remove the Time Machine. When I did that it recognized the drive but that's when I hit the 1.8 TB problem.


For the format to GUID/HFS+, if HFS+ you mean MacOS Journaled, then I tried that. But I still see only 1.8TB. When I click "partition" I see the 1.8TB and I see the 2.2TB as "Free Space", I get an error:

Running operation 1 of 1: Remove "Free space" ((null)) and grow "<HD name>" (disk4s2)....

The new size must be different than the existing size.: (-69743)


When I did the above in APFS, it allowed me to "remove the partition" but when I looked at the drive it was still only 1.8TB.


I'm trying the above steps right now on my WD drive. Haven't tried to get the Seagate firmware yet. Will look into that for my other drive.

Monterey won't reformat Hard Drive

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