I have bought 2 different types of HDD and still I am unable to format using Disk Utilities it always gets stuck halfway.
Will buying an installation disk fix this problem? or is there somethan out there besides disk utility to format the HDD
Regards
-Steve
You say it "gets stuck". What do you mean? Does it stop formatting and issue an error message? Does it just stop formatting and sit there seemingly doing nothing? If the latter, is the disc activity light still on? Please be more descriptive. Also, what make/model/size of HDDs are you trying to format? And have you tried from the console command line?
One final thing - what about partitioning the drive, or does the OSX format program do that for you?
When I can't format some disk, I zeros the beginning of the disk out and try again. It may have something to do with DiskUtil not being able to operate on certain disks with certain partition headers.
First check what's the BSD name of the disk in the DiskUtil infobox. It should be something like disk1234 where 1234 is the the specific number of the disk. If there's any suffix, remove it because it indicates the specific partition of the disk.
Second, open Terminal.app, Type sudo dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024k of=/dev/r[diskn] # where you replace [diskn] with the BSD disk name of the disk you want to format.
Press return, and wait a few second, press Ctrl-C to interrupt the process (You need only to zero out the beginning of the disk).
Replug the disk in, then DiskUtil should be able to format it like a new one.
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