[klydoskop]

I have a new 800dp Mac with an 80gig HD which I wanted to partition for 0S 9 (10gig), OS X(10gig), General usage(56gig) & scratch disk(500MB) for photoshop. After spending more than 10hrs zeroing the data with drive setup, a message appeared saying that initialization failed.. anyone has any ideas why is this so?

What is the best way to partitioning a disk? Is there a limit to the number of partitions or minimum size of each volume a disk can have?

[klydoskop]

initialization failed becos a portion of the HD is locked & unrecognisable by the Mac. How do I unlock it & fully initialize the disk to Mac OS extended? Pls help.. Do I need to manually extract the disk n fiddle with the jumper at the back of the drive?!

[xyber233]

Are you booting up off of the Mac OS cd?

[scarab]

Trying to zero an 80gig HDD is insane!

First Run the Apple hardware diagnostics test and other disk checkers like Norton SystemWorks and DiskWarrior to see if your HDD is fine.
If nothing is wrong, try doing a quick format (not zero) first. If nothing crops up, and you still want to wait another 10 hours, go ahead a zero it.
If you encounter the same problem, perhaps you have a bad sector or some other hardware problem. Try sending it back to Apple and get if fixed.