Problem with new hard drive in superdrive replacement caddy

[urbanforces]

hi, i've replaced my superdrive with a caddy and installed a 1tb drive that is not SSD. it shows up on the desktop and everything seems fine until i try to use it.

when first installed, i tried to change the name but got this message...

http://urbanforces.com/2.png

if i try to copy files to the disk i get this...

http://urbanforces.com/1.png

so i tried wiping the disc and got this...

http://urbanforces.com/3.png

booted into utilities and tried wiping again but got this...

http://urbanforces.com/4.jpg

when i first bought the drive and stuck it in the machine, i was told i needed to initialise it when i booted up. couldn't do anything with disk utilities so took it out, formatted as fat 32 in my pc then stuck it back in. same problem. then i took it out again, wiped using another mac and formatted as mac osx. now i'm in the current situation as described above. searched all over google and can't find any answers.

any ideas anyone? thanks in advance

 

[chscag]

Welcome to the Mac Forums.

I looked over the four images of the errors. It's difficult to determine exactly what's going on with that hard drive. What kind of a caddy or kit did you replace your superdrive with and I'm assuming you have it internally installed in place of the superdrive?

If the caddy or kit is OK, you should have been able to use Disk Utility to format that drive when you first installed it. Disk Utility has no problem formatting (initializing) a bare drive which leads me to believe there may be a problem with the caddy or the drive itself.

 

[urbanforces]

thanks for your reply. the caddy is installed inside in place of the redundant superdrive. the hard drive installed inside that worked fine when plugged into my PC and the other mac i used to format it in osx. as far as i can tell, all the plugs and wires inside are connected properly. i have a feeling there may be some obscure permissions issue since i formatted it in another mac, but i can't think why. when i first tried to access it, "everyone" was set to read only and i wasn't able to add my login to the list of users who can access it. it did eventually allow it though. anyway, i'm stumped.

 

[chscag]

OK, that makes sense. Assuming the caddy is OK and the drive is OK, try removing it and place it in your other Mac. Using Disk Utility in the other Mac, wipe the drive - in other words, erase it completely, and then erase it again by writing 1's and 0's. Use the secure erase feature of Disk Utility but only allow it to do one pass. After that, remove the drive and place it in the caddy again. Try once more to initialize it using Disk Utility. Let's see if that works.

 

[urbanforces]

ok great. i'll try that and let you know how it goes. fingers crossed. thanks very much.

 

[urbanforces]

ok. that didn't work. still get the error -50. i suspect then finally, that there is something wrong with the caddy. when i had the drive out, i restarted my mac and formatted it no problem and could copy files onto it no problem. will have to take it to the doctors then. thanks anyway.

 

[chscag]

Thanks for posting back. Hopefully, you can get a refund for the caddy or at least get a replacement. We usually recommend folks buy the optical drive replacement kit from Other World Computing.

 

[urbanforces]

hi. i finally took my mac to a non-official repair shop and they said the drive i installed required a different voltage to the superdrive, so they swapped it for a compatible one and now everything works great. cheers