External Hard drives: Partition failed with error wiping volume data to prevent future accidental probing failed

Me too. OS X 10.7. Trying to reformat a Lacie external drive. It was encrypted using PGP WDE. But I'm not sure if that's contributing or not. I keep getting the error "Wiping volume data to prevent future accidental probing failed".

Fixed. I decrypted the external drive from the command line (since the PGP GUI no longer runs in Lion).

pgpwde --decrypt --disk 2 --passphrase XXXXX

Download their user manual here:

https://encrypted.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCAQFjAA&url=https%3A %2F%2Fsupportimg.pgp.com%2Fguides%2FPGPwdeMacCmdline_991_usersguide_en.pdf&rct=j &q=PGP%20command%20line%20mac&ei=JRs3TtvdAsTX0QGZrezcCw&usg=AFQjCNFIGk95rzWj8kgh itrJB4Fu7uNoEQ&sig2=f-wRntVYrNTYvfo6bYeNDA&cad=rja

It says it's for verion 9, but it still works.

Then you can reformat the drive. No errors.

I formatted the drive using Windows 7 (even a quick format) and that solved the issue, no need to use PGP, which I couldnt as I had no computer left where it was running on.

actually it's not that easy.. first had to zero out a couple of sectors, either manually or using windows 7's diskpart command line:

command prompt

diskpart

list disk

select disk X

clean all

let it run for half an hour

then partition and format with windows 7 (or maybe MacOSX then too..)

and finally initiallize with MacOSX.

and that finally ends my disk formatting nightmare

I'm sseing the same error with a Vertex Agility 3 in the optical bay (using a caddy). What causes this?