Western Digital HD will not Initialize

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Level 1

7 points

Western Digital HD will not Initialize

Just spent about $200 on a new Western Digital Black HD 4TB and I can not format it to on High Sierra (10.13.3) using Disk Utility.

I have initialized and mounted many HDs over the years but this is the first major headache which seems to have no solution.

This is the report I get from the failure:

"Unmounting disk

Creating the partition map

Waiting for partitions to activate

Formatting disk5s2 as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with name OverFlow

newfs_hfs:

WriteBuffer: pwrite(3, 0x105df3000, 131072, 250093568): Resource busy

newfs_hfs: write (sector 488464): Invalid argument

Mounting disk

Could not mount disk5s2 after erase

File system formatter failed.

Operation failed…"

I am using a Newer Voyager S3 to connect the WD HD to my computer (Mac Pro).

I've searched the web and Was website for solutions and have tried all that were posted but so far no luck.

If anyone has a viable solution, I'm open to it. N.B.: Also I tried using an older MacBook using Lion OS to initialize the HD but that failed also.

Thanks for any feedback.

Posted on Mar 7, 2018 4:32 PM

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Answer 1

Time Keeper Author

Level 1

7 points

Mar 7, 2018 5:20 PM in response to dialabrain

No, I have not, simply because I bought the Voyager for easy exchange of HDs and it has never failed me; this is the so-called first-failure (if it truly is caused by Voyager).

I realize that the Voyager is a middle link, but my options for accessing the WD HD (the one causing Problems) are limited. In other words, I'd have to get some kind of HD enclosure. While I have several, that means that I would have to engage in HD swapping which somewhat defeats the purpose of my current setup of easy workflow/access.

But I may have to resort to that, if indeed there is no other solution. Either that or simply return the WD HD.

Thanks for the insight; it was a lingering thought.

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Answer 2

Time Keeper Author

Level 1

7 points

Mar 8, 2018 6:03 AM in response to dialabrain

The problem was the Voyager S3 connector. I went to my backup system for raw SATA Drives which is the Newer Technology USB3.0 Universal Drive Adapter. I used it to connect the raw WD SATA Drive and it initialized and formatted it within seconds.

Interestingly enough, I am able to use the Voyager S3 with the newly formatted WD HD and it works flawlessly. For some reason I just cannot use it to initialize a new HD.

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