How do I reformat a USB external drive with two partitions one of which is corrupted.
Disk Utility will not work because the faulty partition prevents unmounting of the disk.
Info:
MacBook Air, Mac OS X (10.7.4), Macbook Air bought August 2011
I have a question which I am quite unsure. I am shopping for a HDD drive (Western Digital My Book 3 TB) and was told that it cannot be reformatted to be compatible with TIme Machine.
I would like to verify if it is true.
Info:
iMac, OS X Mavericks (10.9.3)
I have a 2TB Western Digital My Book Studio FW800 external that has 5 partitions, connected to my 2011 iMac. I had help doing the partitions and don't really remember the reasoning, but one is just for my SuperDuper! backup, one is Miscellaneous, one for movie clips off my camcorder, one for misc scanned photo's and one for my genealogy research. I back up using Time Machine to a Time Capsule and also to this WD hard drive with SuperDuper!
Recently I'm getting a pop up message that "Mac OS X can't repair the disk "Genealogy"'. And it needs to be reformatted. It's become a read only disk. When I look in Disk Utility it shows all the partitions as "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" EXCEPT for the one in question. I also noticed that there are a lot of files with "date created" being the same date in 1969! These files may be letters I've written or photo's I added to that partition within the last few years.
I think I have to completely reformat the entire external hard drive to repair this, but I want to make sure. Because it's going to be a major hassle backing it all up to another external (having to get one first) and then figuring out how to make the files that have turned "read only" in that one partition, back to their original state! Does this sound right, that I have to reformat the entire external hard drive? And how do I get the read-only files back to their original state.
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
On my vista / xp machines, I have several external hard drives, Seagate, WD, HP, and 1 enclosure kit which contains some old internal hard drive.I don't really need all these drives on my VISTA/XP machines, as I'm trying to migrate to MAC.
I mostly use my mac for photos & creating home movies. So backing up the priceless pictures of my kids is critical.Do I really need to buy a MAC based external hard drive? or can i simply reformat one of my old drives to use on my mac. I know macs have their own file system (as pc's have fat32&ntfs).
Will apple time machine work with a generic re-formatted external hard drive.I also notice their are fewer choices for MAC ready external hard drives ...less specials than PC based externals.
I have 2 WD External Hard Drive Im trying to copy files from one to the other it wont let me because its read only..
If i Reformat the one with the files so i can copy it using my imac would i lose my files in there?
I've never done anything but plug a HD in and get right to work. Now that I've got an Apple, I'm a total nervous Nellie.I just got a WD external hard drive that is FAT32. I understand that the Mac can read/write this format. Would you recommend that I change it to HFS+ or should I leave well enough alone?
View 20 Replies View RelatedI have a SimpleTech external HD that I want to reformat from PC to Mac. I went to disk utilities and selected "erase", but it will not erase the HD so that I can reformat it.
I have since attached it to my PC, but do not know how to erase/reformat on a PC (I'm a Mac user that only uses my PC for running specific programs). How can I erase this hard drive and reformat it?
I have been using my Seagate external hard drive for movies on my Windows PC and now I have a MacBook. I want to add more movies from my Macbook to the hard drive but it's read only. I want to drag these movies to the harddrive without loosing what's already on there. Can I reformat without loosing everything?
Info:MacBookPro
I purchased an external hard drive ( a Seagate 2 TB Expansion Desktop Drive) and was told by the MAC rep in the store to perform the following simple task to reformat the disk so I could drag and drop files from my iMAC and store them on the external hard drive:
1. Go to Disk Utility
2. Choose the External Hard Drive
3. Select Erase
4. Select MAC OS Extended (Journaled)
5. Click on Erase button
Unfortunately when I do this, I get the following error: Disk erase Failed with Error: File system formatter failed? I have Mac OS X (10.5.8)...
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.5.8)
I try erasing it again and making sure it is formatted for MSDOS and still no luck. So I try partitioning and that is also no luck. 1 part for mac, other free space because no windows option was present
View 8 Replies View RelatedI have a Western Digital 500gig external hard drive (model wd5000c032) which I'd like to completely reformat to use with my macbook pro and Time Machine (running os 10).As it is now, my mac can only use 147 gigs, and often gives an error message saying it needs additional space to backup. It was previously used on a pc to hold pictures, but I doubt it used anything near 357 gigs for that.
View 2 Replies View RelatedYesterday I reformatted my Macintosh hard drive, partitioned it, installed Snow Leopard on one partition and Windows 7 on the other. I installed all the drivers for Windows 7 from the Snow Leopard disc.
When I plug in my 1TB Seagate external hardrive it's not showing up in Snow Leopard or Windows 7. Not even in Disk Utility. I tried plugging the external drive into my Windows laptop and a pop-up comes up saying "USB Device Not Recognised. One of the USB devices attached to this computer has malfunctioned, and Windows does not recognise it." I think that this may just be because it's formatted to Mac OSX?
The hardrive had all of my photos, videos and music on so I hope it's salvageable. I find it hard to believe that the hard drive malfunctioned at the same time I reinstalled the software onto the iMac.
I purchased a Toshiba Canvio 3.0 external hard drive and I need to reformat it to work with my Mac.
View 2 Replies View RelatedI have an external hard drive upon which I put movie files that I view through a Sony box (like the Roku box). I brought my MacBook in for a repair and connected the same external HD and used Time Machine to make a back up. It did reformat it in order to do so, but since the Sony box isn't a pc or mac I didn't think it would make a difference, but now the Sony box won't recognize HD. Is there a way to reformat it on my MacBook so that I can use it on the Sony box again, or do I need to reformat it with a Windows computer? I had no issues when transferring files only and using the Sony box.
View 1 Replies View RelatedHow do I reformat an external hard disc, before used as time machine?
Info:
MacBook Air, Mac OS X (10.6.8), Freecom hard disc
I recently purchased a 3TB Seagate® Expansion® external hard drive for PC. My plan is too reformat it so that I can use it, but it has been acting wierd on me. It says on Disk Utility that it is 4 gbs but I have a 3TB one. Im on OSX mavericks by the way.
View 5 Replies View RelatedHow do I reformat my external hard drive with Mac OS extended using desk utility?
Info:Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.8)
OS-X Lion I now have two useless FW800 external disk drives because I cannot turn off encryption and reformat the disk. (30 years ago, in DOS, this was called a "low level format".)I think I need to use Terminal commands diskutil eraseDisk or diskutil partitionDisk but nether of those commands work. Apparently, I cannot format the command correctly or diskutil cannot remove an encrypted partition.
Info:
Mac OS X (10.7.4)
I need to download Lion from Apple Store to an external Hard Drive and make it bootable. Where can I find step by step procedure?
Info:
Mac Pro (Mid 2010), Mac OS X (10.7.3), Mac Book Pro 2.6, 2006, iCloud
I am unable to find any results in spot light search from my external hard disk. is there any way to index the files on my external hard disk?
Info:
MacBook Pro (13-inch Early 2011), Mac OS X (10.7.3)
Is it possible to manually put an external hard disk to sleep? Right now, I've already got "Put the hard disks to sleep when possible" checkmarked in the Energy Saver preference pane, and so they should sleep after 10 minutes of inactivity, but I'm wondering if it's also possible to do this manually whenever I want.
I just bought an external hard drive and it's already spinning constantly, compared to my current external which is completely quiet, so I'm wondering if I can put it to sleep when I need to to stop it from spinning all the time.
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.4), 3.2 GHz Intel Core i3, 16 GB RAM
I upgraded to Lion by download and I need to reformat my hard drive. How can I reinstall Lion without a disk? I have a Time Machine backup of my hard drive on an external drive.
Info:
PowerBook G4, Mac OS X (10.4.1)
I have two external hard disks, one formatted as FAT32 and another formatted as NTFS.Both cannot be seen in Finder when plug in. Only another one formatted MAC OS extended can.how to dispay my drive in the Finder (I don't want to reformat it as I have lot of contents and need to be read in my window computer.)Im running Mac OS 10.7.3 on my iMAC
Info:iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
i have this strange issue that occured just out of nowhere without me (knowingly) having contributed anything to it.yesterday i launched my iMac and my external firewire drive wasn't showing up in neither the finder nor on the desktop. i instantly thought about a hard drive crash, but soon tried other things to evaluate (or not) my guess.
for instance, i unplugged the drive waited a few minutes before i plugged it in again. since this iomega drive is also equipped with a regular usb port i also switched cables and tried connecting it via the iMac usb sockets as well as via an usb hub without any luck. the drive still won't show up. so i launched the Disk Utility, to see if the drive needs some checking/repairing, but to my surprise it wasn't showing in Disk Utility either.
thus far i only considered this to be an issue with only this particular external drive, but when i eventually switched on a 2nd external drive (this time an usb drive i use for Time Machine) that drive also refused to show up in either the Finder or the Disk Utility app.
curious as i was, i then fired up a 3rd and 4th external drive and now had all 4 drives running at the same time. none of which were showing up, just as if they weren't even connected with the iMac.
this strikes me as more than odd. i've heard about hard drive failures and crashes. they just occur over time. maybe and under some very strange coincidences it is possible that two external hard drives quit their jobs at the very same time, but seriously .... 4 of them?? i hardly think so.
well, maybe it's the iMac's usb/firewire controller that's causing the trouble, i thought. but then again, my other connected devices (iPhone, iPad, Printer, Scanner, eyeTV) are functioning and get detected just fine as far as i can tell.
i have no idea what's going on. i dismiss the idea of 4 external drives having crashed all at the same time just as much as i don't think that the iMac's usb/firewire controller has got any issues. re-formatting any of the 4 drives is out of the question and even if i'd consider such desperate measures, the Disk Utility wouldn't let me re-format anything anyhow, because the drives aren't listed there. i wish i could just use my Time Machine to resolve the issue but, as i mentioned earlier, i can't access the Time Machine because it also won't show up.
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.4)
Recently I purchased an external hard disk, to put all of my pictures of my baby due to space limitations on my internal laptop drive. Since my Canon camera 10 megapixel pictures take up a ton of space this was occurring at an alarming rate. My intention was also to back up to DVD but never got to it. This is both a comment and a question.
Now said baby, is getting really good at pulling cords etc. He managed to do this on the external drive firewire cable. As far as i know the drive was not in the process of actually writing. However, after a few minutes and trying to re-plug the drive the OS crashed with a Grey Screen of Death hardware error that tells you that you need to push the power button..
This apparently corrupted the drive's directory. Upon reboot the drive would not mount. Since there were time machine backups on the drive too Diskwarrior was not able to reconstruct the drive in the built in memory available on the computer. Time machine stores millions of files and Diskwarrior apparently wants to keep it all in memory at once. Since my computer has 2GB you would hope that would be enough but apparently not. So that failed. Other utilities seemed to be able to find the files but not restore the directory. I also took it to the apple store they were not able to recover it.
I have to say this is extremely distressing, and hard to believe that a simple accident like this could cost the loss of thousands of pictures. I did send it to a rescue company but that was expensive but I think apple needs to do something about this situation.
On Windows there is a way to disable the write cache for external drives. This is not available for Mac OS X. This would prevent this rather common occurrence of a plug accidentally becoming disengaged when the drive is not in the process of writing. This reduces the odds but I still think apple, in order to become clearly superior, needs a better solution.
I know Apple has experimented with ZFS would this not eliminate this possibility of this kind of disaster? Is this in Snow Leopard desktop? I know they are thinking this is a business customer focused technology but clearly if it can eliminate this kind of thing then I think it is extremely useful to their non server customers. Perhaps there are other ways of dealing with this issue but ZFS is designed to deal with these issues. HFS+ is extremely fragile to disk corruption.
I know my situation is not that uncommon and this is not the first time this has happened to me with an external drive. You would think I had learned. I hate to think of how many other people have had the same thing happen to them.
Information:
MacBook Pro
Mac OS X (10.5.8)
I've download a Seagate Diagnostics programme to check whether my external Seagate FreeAgent Desk is working properly or not. However, when I run the programme, it indicates that cannot find the disk.
View -1 Replies View RelatedI have a Seagate 1 TB Backup Plus Drive which was working perfectly fine until I plugged it into a USB hub. It detected it while in the hub and I was able to get files off of it, but when I ejected it from the hub and put it back into the USB slot on the computer it was not detected by finder. It shows up in the disk utility and I clicked verify and repair and it says:
Verify and Repair volume “Seagate Backup Plus Drive”
Checking file system
Volume repair complete.
Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.
Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.
Is there any way to get this to work properly again? Or if not is there a way for me to recover my files on the external hard drive?
I have a Macbook PRO late 2011 running OS X Mavericks.
So i put the OSX disk in (10.3) and when i make it boot from the disk the mac logo pops up then it shifts a quarter inch to the right and freezes. I then tried booting it normally and pressed the install button now it boots off the CD automatically with the same result and can't be turned off. Is there an emergency disk remove thing for a powerbook G4? And is there a way to reformat my computer without the disk?
View 1 Replies View RelatedI have an external 500GB Freecom USB HDD with two Data partitions on it (FAT32 and NTFS). With a Windows tool, I made the two partitions smaller in order to free up some space (ca. 200GB) for an additional Mac OS Extended (Journaled) partition. This partition I wanted to create with the Mac OSX 10.6.4 Disk Utility. When I pluged in my USB HDD in my new iMac it mounted the two partitions, NTFS and EXT32 and the Disk Utility tool also showed the free (unpartitioned, almost 200GB) space on the HDD. Then, I chose to create a new Mac OS Extended (Journaled) partition and let the tool do it. ...which I probably shouldn't have done. Disk utility stopped and showed an error message saying that it cannot read the partitions anymore and that it needs to be closed. No partitions can be mounted anymore since then on this HDD. Here is the logfile entry of Disk Utility (unfortunately, it's in German):............
View 2 Replies View RelatedI've connected my new Iomega Minimax with a firewire cable directly to my iMAc but nothing appears on my desktop.
Info:
iMac
