hard drive problems

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alright so my friend is new to macs and didn't know how to format hard drives so he got me to do it for him.
This hard drive was formatted for windows so i formatted to the mac os extended (journaled) which worked fine.
I put the files from his HD to mine but when i returned them to his newly formatted hard drive it said they couldn't be read.
Utility disk said the disk needed to be repaired but i cannot unmount the disk, i understand that nothing from the hard drive can be running to unmount it but how do i know if something is? I had only the finder and disk utility open. Throw some tips and things to try, thanks
 
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Your friend (or you) need to Boot from his OS Install disk, and then run Disk Utilities to repair permissions, and the newly-formatted hard drive.
 
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ok i booted from the os disk and when i try to repair or erase the external hd it is saying operation could not be completed, cannot allocate memory. What does this mean? it sounds bad to me, i have never seen this before
 
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I put the files from his HD to mine but when i returned them to his newly formatted hard drive it said they couldn't be read.

How did u do that?
 
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i just dragged them over to mine because it wasn't much, it works fine on mine
 
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'Cannot allocate memory' is to do with the way in which a hard drive is set out when formatted. It appears also in reference to connection with remote servers. All of which doesn't help your situation.

What's important is HOW you formatted the hard drive. Let's be clear - it's an internal hard drive ... right? ... and you formatted it HFS+ (journaled) so your friend's Mac could boot from it. If that is the case, then what you say about it "sounding bad" may be right.

All I can suggest at this stage is another attempt to format the drive. If it again fails, I suspect there is a serious fault with the drive itself, and it may need replacement if you cannot get Disk Utilities to repair it.

There is one other option - expensive - and that is Disk Warrior. It does more, and better, than Apple Disk Utilities. For its cost (about US$100) you might be better to take the computer to a tech who has DW to use. I don't know what that might cost.
 
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this is actually just his external drive.... he had it formatted for windows and needed it formatted for his new macbook... i cant format the disk, it says it needs to be repaired first. Im going to go to an expert to try and solve this problem i think, thanks for the help though
 

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this is actually just his external drive.... he had it formatted for windows and needed it formatted for his new macbook... i cant format the disk, it says it needs to be repaired first. Im going to go to an expert to try and solve this problem i think, thanks for the help though

Good luck on going to an expert to solve the problem. :) You're probably dealing with a defective drive. Since it was previously formatted for Windows (NTFS or FAT-32) and you then reformatted it as HFS + and subsequently moved files back and forth - and then the drive failed. I'm guessing your friend is going to need a new drive.

Regards.
 

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