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

I am trying to format or partition a number of WD MyBook external harddrives with Lion, and it fails with a least two.

I get "partition failed with error wiping volume data to prevent future accidental probing failed" errors or

"Disk Erase failed: Disk erase failed with the error: wiping volume data to prevent future accidental probing failed"


I tried going through Disk Warrior first and also Drive Genius 3 LE, no success.


Any suggestions?


I also tried formatting one of the hard drives with Windows XP first, but that failed also, despite the disk being mounted.


Cheers


Gregor


Oh and I tried both USB and FireWire.

Mac OS X (10.7)

Posted on Jul 26, 2011 4:15 PM

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5 replies

Aug 1, 2011 2:33 PM in response to abaker

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.

Aug 18, 2011 5:44 PM in response to 0123564849874

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

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

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