Disk Utility can't Format/Mount an External Drive

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Level 2

169 points

Disk Utility can't Format/Mount an External Drive

Hi all,

My raid recently died and I have 6tb disks spare now. I wanted to use them as a place to put manual backups like winclone images etc. However, when I try and plug the drive in disk utility can't seem to do anything with it:

When I plug it in, I hit initalize:

Disk Utility view:

First Aid:

Disk Utility Eras:

If I plug it under windows 10 it can format and deal with it fine, but if I bring it back to OSX High Sierra it complains it's unusable - any ideas?

Thanks.

iMac (27-inch, Late 2012), OS X El Capitan (10.11.6)

Posted on Nov 3, 2017 6:13 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

hippocampe

Level 1

14 points

Nov 13, 2017 7:28 PM in response to solomani

The upper left corner select “View” and show All devices. You should see more information on the device in question. At this point you should be able to format the device.

i had a similar problem and that solved it.

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Answer 2

leroydouglas

Level 10

199,434 points

Nov 4, 2017 9:06 AM in response to solomani

Boot into Recovery and try formatting your Disk from this environment.

Recovery http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718

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Answer 3

solomani Author

Level 2

169 points

Nov 6, 2017 12:41 AM in response to tygb

These didn’t work. I suspect macOS can’t handle such a large external drive. Works fine under Windows so not a disk or connection issue and disk utility can’t mount the drive and says that there is zero kB of space left even though it is a blank 6tb disk.

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