problem formatting external hdd

hello,

i am having a problem formatting a 2 tb western digital hard drive. I am trying to format it so that it is windows compatible but whenever i run disk utility and try to format it there the program stops responding and the loading bar continues to load for hours. i have started to look into using the terminal application to format it, but i am not too familiar with that application and the basic posts they had on websites just didnt do the job.

if anyone could help me out with this process id greatly appreciate it.

thanks in advanced

What format are you trying to make it? If it's FAT, there is a partition size limit of 32GB, so that could be the issue.

well i have also tried to format it as mac OS extended (journaled) and regular, just to see if it could work, but there wasnt any success in that.

First, Disk Utility has no limit formatting a drive to FAT-32. The 32 GB limit is imposed by Windows not OS X.

Second, if you can not format the drive even to the Mac Extended Journaled file system (HFS +) then I would guess there may be something wrong with the drive itself. I would return it or get a refund. WD drives are usually warranted for three years.

I have a problem trying to format a WD drive with a Windows 7 machine. I want to format it because it has embedded software and I'm not able to. That's because it's write protected and I don't know how to get around that. Anyone know how to?

chscag said:

Second, if you can not format the drive even to the Mac Extended Journaled file system (HFS +) then I would guess there may be something wrong with the drive itself. I would return it or get a refund. WD drives are usually warranted for three years.

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yeah, thats what i was thinking about doing, but i wasnt so sure if they would take it back because i tried to reformat it or something.

TrueTone911 said:

I have a problem trying to format a WD drive with a Windows 7 machine. I want to format it because it has embedded software and I'm not able to. That's because it's write protected and I don't know how to get around that. Anyone know how to?

Click to expand...

What's the model number of the drive? Also, you may want to get on the WD site and look up the drive to see if they have instructions about the embedded software. The drive itself can not be write protected or it would be unusable.

However, it's been my experience with embedded software that's write protected... is all you have to do is open the Win 7 File Explorer and change the attributes. In other words, zero them out. Right click on the protected files and select "properties". Remove the check mark from all the attributes.

That makes sense. I'll check it out. Thank you for the suggestion.

Ya I think it's a paper weight. Everything I try, I either get an error window telling me it's write protected or the permission is grayed out and I don't have access to it. Almost as if the account I'm signed in under does not have admin privileges but it does. I picked up an Iomega to use with my wife's Dell and I was going to format the WD and give it to my son. No big loss.

The Iomega worked very well on the Dell by the way. eSATA connection created a 126GB image in 60 minuets. 2 days later she picked up a virus and I had to use that image. Talk about timing.