06-10-2004, 07:21 PM

Hi, i decided to reformat my Lacie 160G external hard drive tonight as it was in the ntfs formatand i wanna use it for video editing with my PowerBook. I've followed the exact instructions for reformatting with disk utility, but how long will it take before the hard drive is reformatted? the blue indicator bar showing how far the creating map partition is, doesnt seemed to have moved in the last two hours, but the hard drive is whirring away. I just hope i wont have messed up this and that somebody will tell me how long it takes to do 160Gigs.

Thanks

06-10-2004, 07:51 PM

Just let is go, it is a slow process, as you are finding out.

Just be patient.

06-10-2004, 07:57 PM

ok, i will be patient enough, but the rate it's going at it'll take a good while. Is it ok for my Powerbook to put itself to sleep while the reformatting is going on?

06-10-2004, 08:12 PM

The system it self will not go to sleep, but the screen will. Just make sure your powerbook is plugged in.

06-10-2004, 08:15 PM

ok,thanks a lot for that, it's past 1am here in the UK, and i'm tired. Hopefully when i wake up i will have got somewhere with the reformatting.

06-10-2004, 08:16 PM

When you get up in the morning, your system should be resting also.

06-10-2004, 08:31 PM

i was just wondering why it takes a while to reformat. When i first bought it was in the hfs format, and when i reformatted it to ntfs, it took maybe 2hours. I'm so glad of forums like this, whatever question i've posted, somebody's always came through for me.

06-11-2004, 02:03 AM

ok, nothing has happened with the external hard drive after 8 hours, disk utility is still running, the external hdd is still whirring away, i cant believe it takes this long, what's gone wrong?

06-11-2004, 02:21 AM

oh well, it did reformat but for some reason disk utility just sat there making me think nothing had happened at all. So i close the program, couldnt see if it had worked properly, for some strange reason opened up disk utility again, ran first aid on it, and voila, my hard drive appeared onto my desktop. I hope somebody could let me know what's happened in the first place.

06-11-2004, 06:25 AM

it takes so long because you probably have chosen to "write zero" or "random 8 times overwrite". just leave the chek boxes unchecked and it will take 1 minute.

06-11-2004, 10:44 AM

What I have found the latest version of disk utility does not have the warning bell when any task is complete, like the older version under 10.2 had. So a lot of time the task is done, but you don't know until you go back and check the application.