[fishguy]

Ok, How do I reformat a master hardrive if the option is greyeds out in disk Utility? I have 3 hard drives. Two off the the main controller, one a master and one a slave. The 3rd is attached to a PCI ATA controller. I used CCC to copy both partitions from the master hard drive to the 3rd hard drive. Now I want to reformat the master to get rid of the partition and recopy OSX and OS9 back to the master.

I did most of this and went back to disk utility to reformat the master drive but its all greyed out. Is this because its the master? Is there another trick to overide and reformat anyway? Once its reformatted OSX and OS9 will be cloned right back.

Any Help?

[fishguy]

update: I rebooted from my new drive (3rd drive) and went back to disk utility. Now the options to erase were not greyed out but when i went to erase the master drive, it stated that it couldn't complete the operation Uunmount drive) because it was in use. I only opened disc copy and from the 3rd drive so i don't know what is in use on the master drive that I'm trying to erase. Any suggestions or is there an overide?

thanks

[reader50]

Drag the original HD's icon to the trash to eject it. The Finder is a likely culprit to be using some files from that HD, it will release it's own files in order to unmount the drive.

[fishguy]

Yeah I tried that. It still says that it is in use. Is there a way to force eject the hard drive (force unmount)?

[a2daj]

What about starting up from an OS X boot disk and using disk utility from that (available from the Installer app menu during installation).

[fishguy]

That worked!! I thought of that but initially discounted it because I didn't think there would be a difference running it from the cd versus another drive, but I tried and that did the trick. I tried it in OS9.

thanks

[JB72]

Just FYI, next time try making sure no apps are running, then log ou/in. Might have to disable login apps for this to work.