[progpoet]

Hi all -

This is my first post here. I just got a 1 TB Western Digital My Book Essential Edition external hard drive and now I'm formatting it. At least, I think I am. I'm not sure I'm doing it right. In Disk Utility it says "newfs_hfs: /dev/partition size not a multiple of 4k and the progress bar keeps moving along, but I can't tell if anything is actually happening. It also says the drive isn't mounted although I have it plugged into a USB port.

Please help me to understand what I'm doing, if I'm doing anything wrong, and if I am, how I can do it right. I bought this for the express purpose of backing up my entire system with Time Machine and I will be EXTREMELY upset if I've messed things up right from the start.

Thanks in advance for any and all helpful responses.


-- Jeff

EDIT: The progress bar has been going for quite some time now and I'm beginning to wonder if I should quit out of Disk Utility or just let it go all night.

[reader50]

The drive probably came with a windoze-friendly partition already on it. Which would use the Master Boot Record partition scheme.

Cancel Disk Utility if you can. Then click on the drive's hardware icon (not the volume icon that may be below the hardware icon).

Now choose the Partition tab. Click the Options... button near the bottom. Choose either Apple Partition Map or GUID Partition Table. If this drive isn't intended for boot purposes, then it doesn't matter which you use. APM might format easier, if you use a PPC Mac. I've seen posts of PPC Macs that seem to 'hang' while formatting a disk using GUID. I've also heard of others who formatted GUID from a PPC Mac without issues. General rule: PPC Macs like APM better, Intel Macs like GUID better. But both should work on either type of Mac.

With the partition scheme selected, go back to the Partition tab. Choose the number of partitions you want - most people go with a single partition. Choose a name (you can easily change this later), and choose a Format. Use "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" unless you have some very specific reason to choose another option.

Let the format begin by pressing the Partition button at the bottom. It shouldn't take very long.

[progpoet]

When I tried to quit Disk Utility, it said there were still operations in progress and that quitting at that point could leave the disk non-operational. Now what?


-- the very confused Jeff

[reader50]

Leave it going if you like. Or force it to quit. If OSX gets persnickety about it afterwards, reboot. Disk Utility should be able to see the drive even if it doesn't mount, and let you format it.

[progpoet]

I should also mention that I'm using a year and a half old Intel iMac, which I just got back after experiencing the APE-induced "blue screen" upgrade nightmare. Thus, the purchase of the drive for backup use.

EDIT: So is it going on so long simply because of the sheer size of the drive? And therefore, will it take all night for this to be completed?

Thanks so much for your response!



-- Jeff

[Big Mac]

Formatting should take very little time. Partitioning my 500GB backup drive was very quick.

[progpoet]

So this is going on too long, then?

Please forgive my ongoing confusion. I've never had such difficulty before. I just want to make sure everything goes right. Thanks again for your responses.


-- Jeff

[reader50]

Go ahead and force-quit Disk Utility. At worst, it will have written out some bogus blocks on the disk. More likely, it got hung up on the Master Boot Record partition scheme, and has been sitting there confused ever since.

If Disk Utility doesn't want to cooperate afterwards, when you relaunch it, then reboot. Disk Utility should be able to see the drive, and you can follow the instructions in my first post.

[progpoet]

I would like to make this bootable. Which Partition scheme should I choose?


-- Jeff

[reader50]

An Intel Mac will technically boot from either APM or GUID schemes, but go ahead and use the recommended GUID Partition Table. If you use APM, the OSX Installer will try to prevent you from choosing that disk.

[progpoet]

Oh no. It says:


This volume will not be erased.
Size: 931.5 GB
Available space: 931.5 GB

Am I screwed here?



-- a very worried Jeff

[reader50]

Is it refusing to proceed, or just kicking up a warning dialog before it starts? Since you don't have anything on the disk at present, there is no need to worry about if the current volume gets erased.

On the other hand, if it's refusing to proceed, try a reboot, then another format attempt. If it still doesn't want to go, try the APM partition scheme. One way or another, it should format that disk for you.

[progpoet]

No warning dialog - just not proceeding.

Reboot, then?


-- Jeff

[progpoet]

Well, I rebooted, but the Partition tab still shows me the same thing. Should I try to erase the volume again?



-- Jeff

[reader50]

Sounds like a bug in the Leopard Disk Utility. It's not doing what it should. Do you still have access to a working Tiger install? I'd try the Tiger Disk Utility next.

If you don't have a working Tiger partition anymore, you could boot from the Tiger install DVD and use the Disk Utility on the install disk.

[progpoet]

I guess I'll try to do this again tomorrow. I should have known this wasn't going to be as easy as I'd hoped. Few things ever are.


*sigh*



-- Jeff

[Mithras]

Don't use the Erase tab -- use the Partition tab.

[reader50]

If the Tiger Disk Utility can't partition & format the drive either, my next step would be to disassemble the USB enclosure and pop the real drive into my G5. Bypass the USB enclosure's translator board, on the assumption that the factory translator board is what's messing things up.

Since you have an iMac, you can't exactly pop extra HDs into spare bays. That would leave other USB or FW enclosures. Or a friend with a PowerMac or MacPro. Note that the actual drive is doubtless a SATA drive, and will not work in a PATA enclosure.

[progpoet]

UPDATE:

I got the drive partitioned and formatted and am now in the process of backing everything up with Time Machine! I believe it's backing up the Mac's internal hard drive, plus two of the three external drives, because the total amount of stuff being backed up, according to TM, is 252 GB.

Right now, as I type this, it's got 134 GB backed up and counting. YAY!

Thanks again to those of you who responded. As embarrassing as it is to admit this, most of the problem, such as it was, was simply due to my own lack of understanding as to how Disk Utility works, and how a bootable drive needs to be partitioned - thus proving, once again, that most computer problems are actually human problems.


-- Jeff

[reader50]

What did you change, to get it to work?

The issues you ran into are not supposed to happen. Partitioning a new HD is supposed to be fast & easy. Which suggests that you ran into a software bug somewhere.

Even if it were human error, unintuitive interfaces usually get fixed to reduce common errors. Example: during the early development of the Macintosh, they were doing user testing. The users ran into their first graphical dialog boxes. The button choices were "Cancel" and "Do it", except they capitalized the "i". So the choices became (Cancel) and (Do It).

Observers noticed the testers were hesitating over every such dialog box, and sometimes got a bit angry. When asked, they said the computer shouldn't be calling them Dolts. So the (Do It) button was changed to the (OK) button we all use today.

So let us know how it fooled you. We might just submit a bug report to Apple about how things could be clearer, to avoid an easy mistake.

[progpoet]

This is so embarrassing ... I didn't realize that I needed to tell Disk Utility how many partitions I wanted. Once I chose "1 partition," everything went smoothly from there.

Please don't kill me.


-- Jeff

[reader50]

We all make mistakes like that now and then.

On the bright side, you're an experienced user of Disk Utility now. You can help the next person who has this kind of problem.

[progpoet]

I just thought it would do everything for me ... how silly and naive. And I say this as someone who has used Macs for a long, long time; in fact, my older brother, when he went to college at Drexel University in Philadelphia as a declared engineering major, back in 1984, the University and Apple had a deal whereby all the engineering majors were required to purchase Macs for half-price. At the time, that was $1000 for a computer with a monochrome screen, no internal memory, a floppy drive, a keyboard and a mouse. He never used it much, but I was fascinated by it. I even wanted my parents to get me a printer for it, but was told that would be too expensive. Yet many years later, he was still able to sell it for $800.

Years later, after I graduated from college and began working, I got myself a Performa 640. It, too, wasn't a great machine, but it was certainly a quantum leap over that 1984 Mac. I loved that machine, despite its limited capability; it too had only a floppy drive, as CD-ROM drives were actually a pretty new thing back in 1993 or 94, and not a whole lot of memory or speed. After that, Apple had its Dark Ages, and reluctantly, I went over to the Dark Side and got a Windows machine, as I was convinced that Apple was going to die and Macs would be no more.

I came back to the Mac with the original fruit-colored iMacs - mine was Grape - and since then I've had the swivel neck iMac, which replaced the original iMac when that one was messed up by some ill-advised Kaleidoscope theme stuff, and now this beautiful Intel iMac, which replaced the iLamp when that one's internal hard drive got toasted (and I didn't have a bootable external drive).

I tell you all this by way of attempting to explain how I could be such a longtime Mac user and yet still not understand how Disk Utility works, as I've simply never had to partition a disk or make a bootable one before. The other external HDs I have are used just for storage, but this 1 TB drive is special, and I just didn't know what to do, really, or how to do it. I suppose I'm damned lucky that I didn't kill this drive completely when I started all this yesterday.

Anyway, what can I expect from Time Machine and this drive now? Any ideas, suggestions, advice for what I should do from here? I have three other external hard drives hooked up - two 80 GB models and one 350 GB model, and I can't imagine that I'll still need to have 'em all connected going forward.

Thanks for all your earlier responses, and thanks in advance for all future ones. I can't tell you how much I truly appreciate it.


-- Jeff

[c_drew]

Thanks for the info!!!!

I too was having the same problem with this drive.

[reader50]

Good to know we're helping people.

About the TB Time Machine drive. I'd suggest leaving it for just Time Machine use. It's a backup after all, and anything "normal" you put on it will not be backed up. However, you could install OSX on it to make it fully bootable, then install any disk repair utilities you own. That way, you could boot from it to make repairs on the main drive, if it were hosed.

About the other drives, I'd suggest seeing if you can move your files around to eliminate one or both of the 80s. You might have been using some of that space for prior manual backups; with Time Machine on the job, you could retire those. Fewer disks in use means less electricity, less noise, and fewer points of failure. Oh, it means you have more spare HDs handy in case of emergency too.

There's no real harm in having more HDs hooked up. For myself, I like to keep my system as quiet as possible. I'm currently at 3 internal drives, with the smallest being a 250. I'd love to consolidate that to 2 internal working drives + 1 big internal TM drive.

[VideoV]

Thought I'd post as I've run in to the same problem with an external disk (a Western Digital) and same error message (on an Intel box running Leopard). The problem with the solution above is that with my WD external disk (connected via Firewire) the "Partition" button never appeared in Disk Utility. I ended up using my venerable G4 PowerBook (still running Tiger), and its version of Disk Utility was able to format the new drive. As I do not require more than 1 partition, the "Erase" worked perfectly. I would not rule out the possibility that there may be a bug in Leopard's version of Disk Utility (Ver. 11.0 (252)).

[jdien]

You guys are awesome! I had the exact same problem as the first guy with the 1T disk and also got stuck at the partition step.