Formatting WD Elements Hard Drive - Problem With Disk Utility 'Partitioning'.

I have a WD Elements Hard Drive, which I want to use with my Mac OS X PowerBook G4 and my Windows7 Acer.

I've used this, under the option of Mac OS X. But on step 3, instead of the clickable options as depicted in the screenshot given, my options are greyed out.


I've backed up the data of the hard drive, and I want the hard drive to be usable with both Windows and Mac. If you need to know, this is the information about the hard drive.

What's wrong with my hard drive, and how am I able to solve it?

Thank you.

I can't explain why the partitioning is greyed out either, unless it has something to do with it being set as Master Boot Record. I don't believe your G4 has the ability to use GUID anyway.

Have you tried to partition it using the Windows 7 Disk Management tool? You should be able to attach the drive to your Acer and open the Disk Management tool and partition it that way. Do not format the drive from Windows 7 as it will not allow formatting a partition that large to FAT-32. Once it's partitioned, reattach it to the Mac and format the partition as FAT-32 using the Master Boot Record scheme.

It's because the selected schema is 'Current'. Change that to 1 partition, and the options should become available.

Good catch Mike. I never bothered to look at that, you're right.

chscag said:

Good catch Mike. I never bothered to look at that, you're right.

Click to expand...

Unfortunately I've been in Disk Util a tad too often recently

Oh, you perfect angels. Thank you so much! I can finally get my several gigabytes of pictures into the hard drive.