Cannot format Lacie External that's RAW........

[saunders45]

I got a USB bus powered Lacie External drive back from one of the guys I work with. Now most of our guys use windows and he needs it formatted NTFS. I cannot however for the life of me, get it to format. It won't even mount on my PB, and dowsn't even show up as existing in Disk Utility. So I put it on a XP machine and tried using the disk management tool. But every time it finishes it says "Can't complete format". I tried some other suggestions from some other PC geek forums, like using killdisk and crap like that, but no dice.

If any of you have and suggestions, please let me know as I would like to get this thing fixed and back to him as soon as possible.


Thanks

 

[yellow]

I'm assuming you know you cannot format it NTFS from your Mac..

 

[saunders45]

Right. I understand that. But I can't even get it to show up period. So I'm starting to wonder if the disk is going bad.

 

[yellow]

Easiest way to find out is crack the enclosure and pop another HD in.. that'll tell you whether the problem is the enclosure or the original HD.

 

[saunders45]

Thats what I was afraid of. Especially since I dont have another 2.5" drive around.......

 

[yellow]

My guess is it won't show up on the PB because it's USB bus powered, and that doesn't work so well for devices like hard drives on the PB. But otherwise, yeah.. IMO the next logical step would be HD swappage.

 

[saunders45]

Well... some good news, some bad. I finally got it to mount on my G4 tower. It that its in FAT16 format. Trying a complete 0's erase.