Disk Utility Crashes on 'Erase'

Hey,

I have USB 2.5" 320gb Western Digital HD I have been trying to format. This, in preparation to Super Duper my current MBP drive over to make a bootable clone and eventually put the 320gb hard drive in my Macbook Pro

Anyway, whenever I attempt to erase the drive and format for MAC, Disk Utlility crashes. Sorry I'm at work and don't have my MAC with me, so don't remember some of the terminology.

Something of interest, Disk Utility sees the eternal usb drive as one generic entity, but nothing seems to be mounted- and it's like I can't do anything with it. So if I plug into my PC, And I have an option of formating the drive (NFTS), which do- to see what happens -then I plug it back into the MAC. I then see the new volume I have created on my PC in disk utility and I got to format this, erase etc. and that is when it CRASHES.

Very convolluted, sorry. I'm well over spending so much time on this stuff. I have things to do by god!!!

Thanks.



Macbook Pro 2.33ghz 15"
Tiger

I should actually say Disk Utility FREEZES. The colour wheel keep spinning, but in the activity monitor it says Disk Utility is not responding.

Hi:

When you get home post back and relate the exact error(s). In the meantime,

With the drive on your desktop, open Disk Utilities and click on the line that shows the external disk capacity. Now click erase. Select the desired format
Mac OS Extended (HFS +).

Change the name of the drive if desired.

Click erase at the bottom of the screen, then click erase again on the second window. Should take about 5 minutes or so to complete the process. (formatting)

Regards.

hi chscag,

thanks a lot, i sorted it out. for some reason i was not selecting the 'generic external media' usb drive. that's all i needed to do. who knows what i was thinking....

but i will ask, is MAc OS Extended (HFS +) and Mac OS Extended (Journaled) the same thing?

regards.

They are the same format, journalling just adds n extra layer of security to HFS to protect the disk and data in the even of a crash