6TB drive won't format as HFS+

Hi all. I'm really new to the Mac world. I have a 640GB drive that is 98% full and so I bought a 6 TB drive that I wanted to clone. I tried cloning it with Acronis but that failed (turns out the hard drive was bad from the manufacturer). I got a new drive and booted the iMac (running El Capitan) with GParted. I have a four-port cradle and connected that to the Mac and then tried to format it as HFS+ and I get an error every time about partition limitations. I initially tried to make one partition of 5.6 TB (give or take) and thought that wouldn't be a problem. Then I tried to make three partitions of about 2 TB each. That didn't work either. I'm ready to throw the whole mess in the river and give up. I don't know why I can't get it to format. I think if I got it to format as HFS+ I could do a restore from my backup and that would, in effect, be a bootable clone (or am I mistaken?). What am I doing wrong?

Welcome to the forum.

What Mac? What version of the OS? Normally to partition and format a drive you don't use third party tools, just Disk Utility in the Utilities folder of the Applications folder. You don't need or want to use Acronis or GParted. Stick with what Apple provided.

As I said, it's an iMac (24" all in one) running El Capitan. I tried using Disk Utility but it doesn't see the drive. I installed the drive brand new thinking it would, at the very least, tell me the drive is not formatted but it just blinks a question mark at me. That is how I ended up trying Acronis and GParted because Apple products didn't do anything. I installed the old drive and then hooked up the new drive via a USB cable (the all-in-one only has one drive bay so I can't install it physically in the unit) and that is the only way it was seen and even then, only GParted saw the drive and identified it properly but it won't format.

OK, well there are a lot of "don't do thats" in what you tried. (Don't take that badly, lots of folks new to Apple are prone to "don't do that" kind of thing.) When you put in the drive, and tried to boot, the boot process saw the drive, and gave the "?" to say that there was no system on the drive. At that point, you could have booted to Recovery (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201314 and https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204904 ) then from there formatted and restored the drive from your backup. But taking it out and using all that other stuff now has the drive in some unknown state. Then you put back the original drive, which booted fine, but then used GParted instead of Disk Utility.

You didn't say which iMac you had, but if it can run Sierra, and if your internet has reasonable speed, what I would do is to put the new drive back in, boot following the article I gave the link for, then use Disk Utility from that boot to partition/format the drive, install an OS and then use Migration Assistant when it FIRST offers to migrate your data from the old drive to get your data and applications transferred. If you don't use the FIRST offer to migrate, it can be done later, but is much more hassle and complicated, so take the first offer to move data and migrate then.

Or, at this point, you can also just use Disk Utility, repartition the drive to ONE partition to start with, just to get control of it, then format for "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)." If that works, then you have options: 1. Clone the boot drive to the new one and swap them or 2. Install an OS on the new drive, swap for the old one and copy back your files from the old one. The first option is the easiest. You can get either Super Duper! or Carbon Copy Cloner to do the clone from your El Cap drive to the new.

Now, if you want more than one partition on the new drive, then between getting it formatted for one partition and the clone/install step, you can redo with Disk Utility the partitioning, making however many partitions you want, format each one with Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and then pick up with cloning the existing system over to the new drive, or installing the OS. But once you have data on the drive, repartitioning will erase everything, so make that decision sooner, rather than later, to avoid redoing all of that.

Awesome! Thanks. I've been working with Windows machines for pert near 40 years but almost zero experience with Macs so I pretty much know nothing about them. The new drive didn't accept the partition in GParted and so it's still in it's original state so I think I might be OK to do as you suggested and try booting to Recovery. I have a full backup on an external drive and so I should be able to pull all of that back onto the new drive and not lose anything if I'm understanding you correctly. Here's hoping!!

Thank you so much for you trenchant commentary on the matter! I REALLY appreciate it!

One more thing: When we ask "What Mac?" what we are looking for is not "24 inch all in one" but rather what is returned when you click on the  in the upper left corner of the screen and then About This Mac. Here is a picture of my MacBook Pro:
As you can see, mine is a MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015). For even more detail and specificity, if you click on the System Report button in that window, you'll get a number for the model in the form of #,#. Mine, for example, is a MacBookPro11,5 model. With that information we know what hardware you have and can be more specific with help. And for what version of the OS, we are looking for the Version shown in the About This Mac window as well, in the form of 10.12.5, as you can see on my image.

And I don't think I've ever been called "trenchant" before! Not sure how to take that one...

And I don't think I've ever been called "trenchant" before! Not sure how to take that one...

Click to expand...

I have to admit that I needed to use my iMac's "Look up…" option on that trenchant. Well done Jake.


I also thought I'd double check on maximum drive sizes just in case the Mac's OS X couldn't recognize the "big" drive, but it's well within the max limits:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201711




- Patrick
======

Got me with that one too. Not often I have to use lookup but definitely needed it there.

Don't use all those Windows style applications. For me Acronis is okay with Windows but have never had success on a Mac. Better options are CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper. Same with GParted..

Did you connect the drive externally via FW800? And the 24" iMac was first releasedf in 2006. Maybe the drive will have to be installed internally to take advantage of the SATA 1.5Gbps. Also nwith the drive connected what does FiskN Utility say and suggest using DU to format the drive Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

For the record, I used the word "trenchant" because it's a compliment!! (Harvard education must have paid off for me). The response was insightful and clear-cut. That's the use I envisioned. I will certainly try to eschew obfuscation in the future and be more forthright in my diatribes.

That being said, thank you for guiding me in how to answer those questions as to "which Mac."

@harryb2448 - I connected the drive just using a USB cable to the back of the unit. I'm going to try what Jake suggested and install the new drive and try to boot to the Recovery and restore from my backup. When the drive would not respond to GParted or anything else, it just basically reverted back to it's normal and did not create any partitions or make any changes to the drive (at least I hope it's that easy).

Thanks for your help, guys. I really do appreciate it very much!!

Michael_Larsen said:

For the record, I used the word "trenchant" because it's a compliment!! (Harvard education must have paid off for me). The response was insightful and clear-cut. That's the use I envisioned. I will certainly try to eschew obfuscation in the future and be more forthright in my diatribes.

Click to expand...

Now that I understood without the dictionary. Not up to Harvard standard yet. Yale, maybe.

No hate mail from the Yale gang please.

LOL

Well, I tried booting into the Recovery console (using COMMAND R right at boot-up) and I still get the question mark.....

Michael_Larsen said:

LOL

Well, I tried booting into the Recovery console (using COMMAND R right at boot-up) and I still get the question mark.....

Click to expand...

Have you tried holding down the option key when you hear the boot chime??

The option for any bootable volume may show up, if they are installed and the drive is working.





- Patrick
======

Was the drive inside or outside the iMac? If inside, that would be expected because you don't have a recovery partition on it from which to boot. You will need to do the Internet boot/install mentioned in both of the links toward the end of the document.

If the drive was outside and CMD-R shows a question mark, then something is wrong with the internal drive. Either it's failed or it, too, has no recovery partition. Same solution, Internet boot/install.

And finally, the CMD-R needs to be HELD DOWN, not just tapped once at boot. I usually hold it down until I see the end of the boot, but I'm told you can let it up sooner than that, but it's definitely a long press.

The drive was inside the iMac. I also held the CMD-R keys down until I finally got the message "Missing Operating System." I guess that's a moot point though because it sounds like I need to do an Internet boot/install. I'll look into that.

I have an old OS disk with Leopard on it. Could I boot with that and then run a Time Machine restore from my external backup and if so, would it overwrite the Leopard OS in favor of a full volume restore? I don't even know if that's possible but I thought I'd ask.

Thanks!

You have still not told us what model iMac you have. If the Leopard disks came with the iMac, then you can boot from there, see if Time Machines is available and see if it will restore. I suspect not, because Leopard is pretty old and your backup probably has a much more recent version of OS X. But the Leopard disk, if it's the originals for the system, will let you format the drive for Mac, which is at least a start on the issue.

Oops. So sorry. I meant to post all the info last night but I was unable to get back to my computer. The information is as follows:

OS X El Capitan
Version 10.11.6
iMac
Processor: 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Memory: 8GB 1067 MHz DDR3
Graphics: NVidia GeForce GT120 256MB

That might be more than you need but it's what came up in the ABOUT screen so I thought I'd just post it all.

The latest development is this: I was able to format the new drive using Carbon Copy Cloner. I did it with the new drive installed and I just downloaded the software and formatted it that way. HOWEVER, I ran into a snag when trying to format the entire drive. It would not let me format the entire drive as one volume. I had to create two partitions of about 1.7TB each and then the remaining memory (about 1.99 TB) wouldn't format at all using HFS+. I set it as UNALLOCATED and now I have the cloned original drive on the first partition (and it boots normally). The second partition doesn't show up on the desktop so I'll have to set up that shortcut and can use it for storage. I really wish I could just format the entire drive as one HFS+ volume but it won't work.

In any event, I am elated at this point that the new drive actually took the clone perfectly and it boots from it. I did manage to lock myself out of my cloud account but whoopdeedoo. I'll fix that later.

So, any ideas on how I can, at the very least, partition the second partition and the unallocated space into just one partition? I'll leave the first partition alone because it's actually working.

Thanks for your help and your patience!!

Mike

Hmmm…??? If this is a 2.33 GHz Intel iMac, somethings amiss:
That model:
- can't run anything greater than Maximum MacOS: X 10.7.5*
- can't use anything more than Maximum RAM: 4 GB*
etc.
http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/imac/specs/imac-core-2-duo-2.33-24-inch-specs.html

http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/imac/index-imac.html

Or I'm really not understanding something.





- Patrick
======

@Patrick

It appears to be an early 2009 24" iMac with a GeForce GT-120. That model can run El Capitan and hold 8 GB.

The latest development is this: I was able to format the new drive using Carbon Copy Cloner. I did it with the new drive installed and I just downloaded the software and formatted it that way. HOWEVER, I ran into a snag when trying to format the entire drive. It would not let me format the entire drive as one volume. I had to create two partitions of about 1.7TB each and then the remaining memory (about 1.99 TB) wouldn't format at all using HFS+. I set it as UNALLOCATED and now I have the cloned original drive on the first partition (and it boots normally). The second partition doesn't show up on the desktop so I'll have to set up that shortcut and can use it for storage. I really wish I could just format the entire drive as one HFS+ volume but it won't work.

Click to expand...

OK, now I'm totally confused. CCC cannot format a drive, AFAIK. The knowledge base at CCC's host page says to use Disk Utility to do that, clearly. So I'm not sure how you formatted the drive with CCC. That said, if you did, in fact, get it formatted with CCC, I wonder if there is some limitation in CCC that is creating the issue for you. Given you have the CCC backup still (right?) then what I would suggest is to boot from the CCC clone, use Disk Utility to erase/partition/format the internal drive into the one drive you want and then use CCC to clone the system back onto that newly formatted drive. Be careful to make sure you select the internal drive for the erase/partition/format process. There isn't any reason I can think of that El Cap cannot handle a single 6TB drive, or format any number of partitions on that size drive.