• Apple OS X

  External Hard Drive Formatting Taking Over 2 Days

  Posted by Amy Lafleche on December 14, 2011 at 3:43 am

  I have a 2TB Western Digital My Book Essential External Hard Drive. Brand new.

  I set it up to my Mac and using Disk Utility I went to Erase, set the Volume Format to Mac OS Extended and renamed the drive.

  It has now been 55 hours. I’ve read in a few forums that a hard drive this big can take up to 2 days to format but I’m concerned and getting impatient. Does anyone know if this is normal?

  The status bar is blue and running and has this message beside it:
  newfs_hfs: /dev/rdisk3s2: partition size not a multiple of 4K.

  Here’s some info on my Mac:
  Mac OS X 10.5.8
  2.66 GHz Quad Core Intel Xeon
  3GB Memory

  Thanks in advance!

  John Davidson replied 14 years, 5 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  John Davidson

  December 16, 2011 at 1:48 am

  I’ve run into WD my book problems before. It’s possible that the HD has built in firmware that won’t let it be formatted. It can be very frustrating because they try to force their less than stellar software down on you. Another possibility is that your HD is bad – it happens.

  John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

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