Formatting a NewerTechnology drive

[kimmer]

My main HD is starting to fail so Sneakers had me order a NewerTechnology miniStack USB drive from OWC. I did. It arrived. We plugged it in, it showed up on desktop. Because Sneakers wants me to back up both of my internal drives, he said to partition my external into 2 partitions.

Okay. I go to DiskUtilities (which is what NewerTech's tech support says to use), I select:

• 2 partitions
• Mac OS extended Journaled
• No OS 9 drivers
• Apple partition MAP

Gave the partitions names, clicked partition and watched the spinning beach ball.

Two hours later the beach ball is still spinning. Three hours later it's spinning and my failing hard drive is kicking and groaning. I had to force quit DiskUtility so that I could put my computer to sleep for a few hours (putting it to sleep seems to help my failing drive).

Back into DiskUtility and select the same stuff except this time I skipped the journaled (I don't even know what that is?).

The results? The same.

I gave up last night.

We tried again this morning and I'm now on my second try this afternoon. Nothing is working but that beach ball.

I checked at NewerTech's support base and this should work. I will probably open a ticket, but thought I'd ask if anyone here has any ideas.

One other thing I've noticed is that during this partition process, nothing else on my Mac wants to work well.

I would like to back up this failing drive before I lose it totally, plus I need to actually do some "work" with my computer and can't while it's all tied up because of the slow downs.

I'm frustrated.

[kbeartx]

Kimmers -

While there might be something wrong, IMO it's more likely that the new drive is so big that it will always take many , many hours to do something like partition [or write all zeros].

Those of us who started our computer life with hard drives that were typically 500 megabytes  or so can easily fail to consider that a 500 gigabyte drive is one-thousand times as big, and consequently takes WAY longer to format, erase, defrag, etc.

[kelly]

Writing zeroes can take forever. I don't see you're doing that.  

Put it in your G4 and try it.

Power Mac G4 (QuickSilver) and (QuickSilver 2002): CIP Instructions

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=75314

Drive could be bad.

[kimmer]

It's only an 80GB drive, so it really shouldn't take this long. (My first drive was 20mg. Amazing!)

Just in case it's my computer, we moved this drive to Sneakers and it is now going on 3 hours and still the beach ball.

Kelly, I'm also wondering if it could be a bad drive. We'll pop it into Sneakers machine and check it out (we are trying not to turn mine off as we don't want to take a chance on the drive not rebooting.)

Thanks, kbear and kelly.

[kelly]

It should happen pretty quickly kimmer. Minute or two.

Try Erasing it without Partitioning it and see what happens.

[kimmer]

Erase and format is now going on ... 3 hours.

I have a support ticket in at NewerTech.

My failing drive hasn't failed me yet, but I backed up the most important stuff onto a DVD.

[MamaMoose]

Kimmer,

It appears you have a bad drive. Should take only a few seconds to partition and when you erase there should be a progress bar. have you using Disk Utility to verify the drive. That should tell you if all is well.

MamaMoose

[kimmer]

Well, bummers.

Drive is definitely bad -- right out of the box! *growl*

DiskUtility can't verify it.
Disk Warrior can't locate/check/repair it.

Even tried hooking it up to the Linux machine and it can see it but not partition or repair it.

So ... I'll be contacting OWC and/or NewerTech to get it returned/replaced.

I'm just hoping my failing drive holds up. :insert worried smilie here:

[kelly]

You deserve a "Discount" for your troubles IMO.  

[kimmer]

^Would you mind getting a temp customer service job at OWC while I resolve this?