WD 3TB Red Hard Drive can't format.

Are your SATA drive bays controlled by anything other than native SATAII ports?

Try booting to ML Recovery and use Disk Utility there.

Yes, it should.

Amazon US has WD RED 3TB $118, might want to try there... and I thought I saw in reader comments Mac users.

Hatter was fishing for, "are you using the Mac Pro RAID card?"

Bay 1 is a bit of tight squeeze. Is it possible the drive is not quite seated? Have you tried a wide-open bay like 2,3,4?

Are the drive screws all tight (since that determines drive alignment to the sled and whether the connector will be able to seat properly)?

I am pretty sure folks have installed these without difficulty.

It sounds like they shipped you a "sample defect". (A problem that occurs on just one of a standard product.)

"A drive that cannot report both its Make&Model AND a reasonable size/capacity to Disk Utility cannot be repaired or erased by any software. If the cabling and power are OK, the drive has died."

d60Dave wrote:

I'm just wondering if I caused a problem by trying to initially format it using a USB SATA dock on my work iMac?...

I doubt it. I've formatted HD's using both a NewerTech Voyager Q with an eSATA connection and a NewerTech USB 3.0 Universal Drive Adapter (connected to both a Mac and a PC) and never had a problem. The drives went on to lives in other devices with nary a hiccup. Unless there was something wrong with your Akasa unit, formatting it through an adapter shouldn't make any difference.

Hi, please can you look into the Disk Utility and see if the disk was not actually recognized as a "Logical Volume Group"? If yes, the following should help (obviously this assumes you do not have any data on the disk which you would want to preserve).

1. Close Disk Utility and Open Terminal

2. run "diskutil cs list", copy the volume group's UUID to clipboard

3. run "diskutil cs delete <volumegroup-uuid>"

Once it is done (should be quite fast), open the Disk Utility again, the disk should be there with one volume and it should be possible to initialize it normally.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for that reply! I'm very new to the Mac world so haven't done much "under the hood". I just purchased a WD Red 3 TB for my Hackintosh media server. I went to format it and got the message in disk utility that the partition contained a locked disk, all options greyed out. Your fix solved the problem.

Thanks again!

And now there is a bug in 10.8.4 not working with drives larger than 2.2TB so that is another issue outside of the RED series being totally not supported for some reason by the SATA ii controller - it should be fine but only in a NAS or hardware RAID environment. - just not Apple Pro RAID that does not support any drives 2.2TB and up due to its own problem.

4 month old thread. And now 10.8.5 is out and others have asked about using 3 and 4TB drives which were or are an issue in a Mac Pro 2008 on as well as use of RED line drives from WD.

I have two new 3TB Toshiba DT01ACA300 drives. Both are in an eSATA enclosure connected to a MacPro 3,1 (early 2008). The eSATA card is the NewerTech from OWC.

One drive was being used as my Time Machine drive, the other as just a Finder drive. I started getting TM backup errors. I tried reformatting the drive a couple of times unsuccessfully. I decide to install the drive on the internal SATA bus to see if I could format it there. Eventually, in the Terminal after using "diskutil eraseDisk JHFS+ UntitledUFS disk4" I got:

Started erase on disk4

Unmounting disk

Creating the partition map

Waiting for the disks to reappear

Formatting disk4s2 as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with name UntitledUFS

Initialized /dev/rdisk4s2 as a 3 TB HFS Plus volume with a 229376k journal

Mounting disk

Could not mount disk4s2 with name UntitledUFS after erase

Finished erase on disk4

Ok. i checked it with "diskutil list" and got this:

/dev/disk4

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *3.0 TB disk4

1: EFI 209.7 MB disk4s1

2: Apple_CoreStorage 3TB 3.0 TB disk4s2

3: Apple_Boot Boot OS X 134.2 MB disk4s3

/dev/disk5

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: Apple_HFS Time Machine *3.0 TB disk5

Why was it formated with a CoreStorage Logical Volume Group?

So I ran:

"diskutil cs delete 2A91F7FC-62DD-474A-BB10-9C674B7C2FE0"

Started CoreStorage operation

Ejecting Logical Volumes

Destroying Logical Volume Group

Erasing disk4s2 3TB

[ | 0%..10%..20%..30%..40%..50%..60%..................... ]

[ / 0%..10%..20%..30%..40%..50%..60%..................... ]

[ | 0%..10%..20%..30%..40%..50%..60%..................... ]

So again it formats the drive with a Core Storage partition.

The other 3TB Toshiba DT01ACA300 drive is NOT formated with a Core Storage partition, nor has Disk Utility or diskutil ever tried to install one.

So I'm trying "diskutil cs delete <volumegroup-uuid>" again and I get this..

Started CoreStorage operation

Ejecting Logical Volumes

Destroying Logical Volume Group

Erasing disk6s2

[ - 0%..10%..20%..30%..40%..50%..60%..................... ]

but now it stalls there and nothing happens. (been waiting an hour)

What's going on here? Why can't I get rid of the CoreStorage and Logical Volume Groups on this drive? And how did this drive get formatted like this in the first place when the other one didn't? Initially it was not formatted that way.

Is the drive bad? I can't think of anything else. Toshiba is ready to take it back. I've read there might be an issue with 10.8.5 and 3TB HDDs. One formats without a CoreStorage partition, and the other only will. This makes no sense.

It's kinda wierd that it somehow got formatted like that after a TM error, and now I can't get rid of CoreStorage.

I NEVER used File Vault. It was a TM drive only. Does TM encrypt a partition, or create Logical Volumes somehow?

Regardless, the "diskutil cs delete <volumegroup-uuid>" stalls. Had to type ctrl-c to quit. Terminal still sees drive but won't format or mount now. Tried "diskutil eraseDisk JHFS+ UntitledUFS disk6" again. Nothing.

Thanks