Error when initialising brand new hard drives

Question

Error when initialising brand new hard drives

I bought 2 3TB Seagate and 2 Western Digital hard drives. I opened the electrostatic protection bag, removed an existing hard drive from an enclosure, put the new hard drives in. USB-C cable, no in-between hub, etc. Each and every one cannot be initialised. After around 5 hours, the Disk Utility initialisation process (ExFAT, erase) ends with the error -69825 every time. I tried other enclosures. Same thing. I tried another MacBook Pro. Same thing.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 12.7

Posted on Mar 15, 2025 10:34 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

stanislaus ernst Author

Level 1

14 points

Mar 18, 2025 12:06 AM in response to HWTech

All are brand new 3.5" drives, right out of their electrostatic protection bags, purchased online from a large reseller. The enclosures support 3TB drives, I used them in the past with 3TB drives already.

In the end, I got it to work with all of them. I used a Windows laptop and a USB 2.0 Type-B cable and was able to format them ExFAT. Now the MacBook Pros can read and write to them.

Reply

Answer 2

Mar 17, 2025 6:54 PM in response to stanislaus ernst

So are these bare drives that you are installing into an existing drive enclosure?

What enclosure(s) are you using?

Do the enclosures even support a 3TB+ drives? Older enclosures, docks, adapters could only support up to 2TB drives.

Are these 3.5" or 2.5" drives?

Where did you purchase these drives? I just read an article recently where someone was taking their used hard drives from a failed business & changing the drive firmware data so that the drives appeared as brand new to most utilities. Someone created a script/utility to read the real physical drive health information to compare it with what is reported by SMART to see if the information matches (meaning a used drive was not modified to appear as new).

You can try checking the health of the hard drives by using DriveDx (free trial period). You will need to install a special USB driver in order to check the health of external drives.

Reply

Answer 3

Mar 15, 2025 10:40 AM in response to stanislaus ernst

Are you trying to use included apps on the drives to initialize them? If so, use Disk Utility and format each drive at the top level.

Reply

Answer 4

Mar 15, 2025 11:01 AM in response to BobTheFisherman

No apps on the drives; brand new, right out of their electrostatic protection bags.

Reply

Error when initialising brand new hard drives

Similar questions