[Andrew Stephens]

Hello All

Just slapped a new WD 250GB drive in an empty bay on one of my Macs and it's not initialising. Disc utility sees it OK but it only offeres a choice of Apple HFS or UNIX for file systems and erasing or partitioning fails due to an invalid size apparently.

Set the drive to slave first and then tried it on cable select but same difference.

Any ideas

regards

Andrew

[mduell]

Try only formatting 127GB.

[Andrew Stephens]

I see what your saying but it already has a 500GB drive working fine on the other ide bus.

[mduell]

Does the 250GB drive work on that other IDE bus? Could be a situation where one controller (intended for the optical drives) doesn't support LBA48 while the other does.

[Andrew Stephens]

Originally Posted by mduell 

Does the 250GB drive work on that other IDE bus? Could be a situation where one controller (intended for the optical drives) doesn't support LBA48 while the other does.

This Mac has three IDE busses. One for the two optical bays, one for the two front drive bays and one for the rear two drive bays. However it sounds like it might be worth putting the 250GB drive on the same bus as the 500GB one just to check.

[Andrew Stephens]

Ho Hum.

Tried rearranging the drives in the old girl. Got the new 250GB drive and the 500 on the same (main) IDE bus. The other bis holds a 40GB drive (system) and a backup drive (160GB).

When starting the 250GB drive seems to make a series of strange clicking noises. Disk Utility sees it fine as an unformatted drive. When I attempt to format it still only offers me UNIX or Mac OS Extended and when I try to partition it the whole thing greys out and I need to start Disk Utility again.

I guess the drive may be faulty. I'm taking it back tomorrow.