Disk Utility won't format my WD Elements 1TB Hard Drive.
I've searched the forums for this and have seen several questions addressing this but none of the solutions are working for me. Here's my problem:
My IMac died on me the other day and would not reboot. Spoke with Apple support and they decided my OS had become corrupted and that the only solution was a complete reinstall. To save my data the rep walked me through installing the OS on an external HD. This has worked great and I'm currently working off that drive and have managed to pull a lot of my data off the IMac's HD to that external drive. But I've run out of space; it was only 120GB and I've got about 144 GB of data left to retrieve. So I purchased a WD Elements 1 TB external HD and want to do the same thing that I did with other drive...install the operating system on it and pull all the data off the original computer HD to it. But I cannot for the life of me get anything to work. Unfortunately I purchased a drive that is formatted for windows (NTFS). I've gone through the steps found in this forum, and they're the same steps the rep walked me through with the first drive: launch Disc Utility, select the drive, click Partition, give the volume a name, click options to choose GUID Partition Table, and then under Volume Scheme: choose Partition 1, click apply.
But what happens with this drive is the minute I change the Volume Scheme from "current" to "partition 1", all the options and buttons go grey. So I'm unable to click apply to make the changes. I've tried several different times and nothing is working. I've even tried to just format it using the "current" volume scheme but that gives me an error...something about partition failed...permission denied.
At this point I'd be happy with just formatting the drive so I can just drag the files I want off onto it...but I can't seem to find any solutions. I took the drive to a Windows XP machine I have and tried to format it from NTFS to Fat32, thinking maybe the Mac would work with it then but my XP machine won't format into Fat32...only EXFat. Tried that but the Mac wouldn't even show the drive then. Have reformatted it back to NTFS now.
I'm probably going to end up calling Mac support again but they're closed now I'm just curious to see what you folks might be able to come up with.
Good thing I shave my head as I'd have probably ripped it all out by now.
My IMac died on me the other day and would not reboot. Spoke with Apple support and they decided my OS had become corrupted and that the only solution was a complete reinstall. To save my data the rep walked me through installing the OS on an external HD. This has worked great and I'm currently working off that drive and have managed to pull a lot of my data off the IMac's HD to that external drive. But I've run out of space; it was only 120GB and I've got about 144 GB of data left to retrieve. So I purchased a WD Elements 1 TB external HD and want to do the same thing that I did with other drive...install the operating system on it and pull all the data off the original computer HD to it. But I cannot for the life of me get anything to work. Unfortunately I purchased a drive that is formatted for windows (NTFS). I've gone through the steps found in this forum, and they're the same steps the rep walked me through with the first drive: launch Disc Utility, select the drive, click Partition, give the volume a name, click options to choose GUID Partition Table, and then under Volume Scheme: choose Partition 1, click apply.
But what happens with this drive is the minute I change the Volume Scheme from "current" to "partition 1", all the options and buttons go grey. So I'm unable to click apply to make the changes. I've tried several different times and nothing is working. I've even tried to just format it using the "current" volume scheme but that gives me an error...something about partition failed...permission denied.
At this point I'd be happy with just formatting the drive so I can just drag the files I want off onto it...but I can't seem to find any solutions. I took the drive to a Windows XP machine I have and tried to format it from NTFS to Fat32, thinking maybe the Mac would work with it then but my XP machine won't format into Fat32...only EXFat. Tried that but the Mac wouldn't even show the drive then. Have reformatted it back to NTFS now.
I'm probably going to end up calling Mac support again but they're closed now I'm just curious to see what you folks might be able to come up with.
Good thing I shave my head as I'd have probably ripped it all out by now.
IMac 7,1, Mac OS X (10.5)
