Reformat damaged unrecognized external harddrive

[katiegatie1234]

I have a 500 GB WD hard drive and somehow everything on it got erased. I've done my mourning for my data and I want to just erase and reformat the thing so it will at least work again, but it isn't recognized by my mac or pc.
When i plug it in it says there is a disk insertion error and I can initialize, ignore, or eject. In disk utility, it shows up but I can't do anything in disk utility because everything is greyed out. I tried erasing it in disk utility under the erase tab, but it said there was an input/output error.
Is there another way to erase and restore it?
Thanks.

 

[harryb2448]

Connect up the drive, which I take is external. Pop in your Leopard or Tiger install DVD and reboot holding down 'C' and go to Utilities and see if the disk is shown in Disk Utilitiy there.

If so hit Repair Disk and let's know how you get on?

 

[katiegatie1234]

It shows up in disk utility, that's not the problem. The problem is that it doesn't show up on the desktop and every option in disk utility is greyed out or has errors. I can't repair or erase it from there.

 

[falcontook]

try what harryb2448 said, the disk utility on the disc might give you more options, and also what format is the external hard drive before it stopped cooperating =p

 

[chscag]

It sounds like the drive may have suffered damage to its first sector (which contains drive info, etc). If the drive is still under warranty, give WD tech support a call (or go to their website) and ask them to RMA the drive.

http://support.wdc.com/

They might want you to run their WD diagnostics first. If they do, they'll have you download their diagnostic software to your PC. Attach the drive to the PC and run the WD diagnostics. The diagnostics program will be able to tell if the drive can be repaired or not.

Regards.

 

[Mitch Diamond]

initialize 1.5 TB drive

I am having trouble zeroing out a 1.5TB drive. The drive was having major directory problems so I erased it. That worked fine. I figured that I'd better zero it out because the directory was so messed up. Disk utility hung in the middle of the process and I had to reboot. I've since read that Disk Utility can't initialize a disk above 500 mgs since 10.4.6. Now I'm stuck with I drive that I believe was good until I tried to zero it out. Now it just appears in Disk utiliity and is grayed out. The disk appears but no volume name appears under it. I don't know anybody with a Mac that can run under 10.4.6. Does anybody know a work around? Has anybody solved this problem? I understand that Apple has known about this for a while but has yet to fix the bug.

 

[chscag]

Where did you read of the formatting limitations since 10.4.6? That doesn't seem to be true according to this Apple KB article:

Mac OS X: Mac OS Extended format (HFS Plus) volume and file limits

Regards.