New hard drive in Mac Pro showing 0 bytes after partitioning

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New hard drive in Mac Pro showing 0 bytes after partitioning

I bought a Western Digital Caviar 2TB internal hard drive for my Mac Pro (2 x 2.66 GHz Dual Core Intel Xeon (late 2006), 12GB RAM, Mac OS 10.6.8). It already has two 500GB internal drives in two of the four slots.

I slotted the new WD hard drive in and started up the Mac, getting an alert saying there was an unrecognisable disk and did I want to initialise it? Yes, so it opened up Disk Utility.

This showed my two 500GB drives plus the new WD drive at 2TB. To initialise it I erased the disk which failed with an error ("POSIX reports: The operation

couldn't be completed. Input/output error").

I next decided to use Partition instead, choosing just one partition of 2TB, Mac OS Extended (Journaled). After 7 minutes it said the process had been completed and the volume was mounted, though it didn't appear on my desktop, just in Disk Utility. I thought a restart would refresh and show it on the desktop.

Once the Mac was up and running again there was nothing there at all - and now it wasn't even listed in Disk Utility. I shut down, took the hard drive out,

looked at it, scratched my head, replaced it, and turned the Mac back on.

Once again I got an alert telling me the disk was uninitialised and would I like to format it, so clicked OK and Disk Utility opened. This time the disk was

there (WDC WD20EZRX-00DC0B0) but no volume. The info said the drive had a size of 0 Bytes and I could not erase or partition as all buttons were greyed out,

with the Partition tab saying 'this disk is too small to contain partitions'.

So what can I do now? According to macupgrades.co.uk this drive should work in my model of Mac (they recommend and sell it, though I purchased it from NORDPC via Amazon as it was a little cheaper).

http://www.macupgrades.co.uk/store/product_info.php?products_id=532

I tried, with the help of my more computer-literate brother, to erase the disk from the command line via the Terminal, getting a result of "Error: 6: POSIX

reports: Device not configured". (Actually we first tried to reformat it, with an error of "does not appear to have a valid file system format").

Does anyone with more knowledge of such things have any ideas or advice? It would be much appreciated.

Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8), 2 x 2.66 GHz; 12 GB RAM

Posted on Apr 19, 2013 6:11 PM

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Answer 1

Apr 19, 2013 6:20 PM in response to tybaltstone

Sounds like you got a bad one. I suggest you return it for a replacement.

Allan

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Answer 2

Apr 20, 2013 8:53 AM in response to tybaltstone

tybaltstone wrote:

...I next decided to use Partition instead, choosing just one partition of 2TB, Mac OS Extended (Journaled). After 7 minutes it said the process had been completed and the volume was mounted, though it didn't appear on my desktop, just in Disk Utility. I thought a restart would refresh and show it on the desktop...

Just a thought: when you set up the partition in the Partitions tab, did you also open Options and chose GUID Partition table?

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Answer 3

tybaltstone Author

Level 1

25 points

Apr 23, 2013 1:44 AM in response to Allan Eckert

Many thanks for your reply, Allan. I'm not convinced it's a bad one - want to see what else I can do before having to return it. It seems to be a formatting problem, only now my Mac thinks the drive is 0 bytes I can't do anything with it.

One suggestion has been to put it in a PC and reformat it there, then return to the Mac to try again (just have to find a PC somewhere!).

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Answer 4

tybaltstone Author

Level 1

25 points

Apr 23, 2013 1:45 AM in response to FatMac-MacPro

FatMac\>MacPro wrote:

Just a thought: when you set up the partition in the Partitions tab, did you also open Options and chose GUID Partition table?

Thanks for the reply, FatMac - yes, it was set to GUID.

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Answer 5

The hatter

Level 9

60,990 points

Apr 23, 2013 4:09 AM in response to tybaltstone

Unless the drive and sled are not inserted properly - unlikely - or that other drives don't work in that slot - watch out if true, unlikely but loose SATA cable - it IS a bad drive.

If you don't have a PC, setup Windows VM and use WD Lifeguard which is excellent and tests for things like bad SATA cable communicating.

You could also - I always use Partition tab btw - go in there and set it to exFAT and Windows Master Boot Record. All you want is a good drive. This one is not.

GUID tests first and last 10,000 sectors or more to insure that the partition tables and hidden areas work (they are not it is failing). Use to be that a "backup volume information block" was treated as optional if any sectors failed, now it is not.

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