I've just bought a mac book pro and wish to format my external hard drive I was previously using with my PC so I can now use it with my mac. I tried erasing it using disk utility, but the application becomes non responsive and I end up having to force quit it. All I'm looking to do is to be able to put my movies/pictures etc on it. Any help would be much appreciated. Thankyou
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formatting external hard drive
- Thread starter aaronsmith
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What brand of casing is it? Does it have a separate power supply? What format did the PC leave it in? 
It's a Samsung 100gig USB drive, I never used the seperate power supply on my PC but it appears I need it to run it on my mac, it was in NTFS... thanks for your help.
well, i can get stuff off it, but can't save anything to it. I thought I might be able to format it so it works with my mac...
Yeah, that'll be the NTFS formatting. Try reformatting it to Mac OS Extended (like ozontheroad said) or FAT32 now that you've got it plugged into the power. Mac OS Extended is more reliable and has less file size +character limitations, but FAT32 will work properly with both PCs and Macs.
In disk utility I selected erase and I chose "Mac OSX Extended (Journaled)" and selected "Install Mac OS 9 disk driver"...
I don't think so, it doesn't seem to be doing anything. And it says that the application "Disk Utility" is not responding.
Bugger. Well give it a little while and try not to use the machine for anything else. Hopefully it's just working really hard.
Try repairing permissions (Macintosh HD -internal-) and verifying the disk (USB and Macintosh HD)
I hope so, I've tried that a couple of times with no success over the last couple of days. I now get a message when I connect it that "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer" and gives me the option to Initialize, Ignore or Eject.
In disk utility under the "First Aid" tab, there is nothing there, and I can't click on "Repair Disk" or "Verify Disk"
If you can't format it on this machine, then can you take it to another machine (PC or Mac) and reformat it as FAT32 there? There might be a small corruption in the current formatting of this disk and using another machine such as your old PC might help bypass it.
I'll give that a go, I don't have my old PC but I'll try it on my friends Mac. Hopefully I'll get some results. Thanks for you help
No worries mate. If the other Mac doesn't work, try it on a PC (if possible). They generally work slightly better with USB devices.
Good luck.
Good luck.
I had the same problem trying to format my external WD USB drive. There is a bug with Tiger and a certain USB firmware driver. I can't recall which one it is, but it sounds like you have it.
The problem is that Tiger won't format an external USB drive. It's a pretty big bug IMO and I can't figure out why Apple won't fix it. It's not like a few people have experienced it, if you google I am sure you can find a good share of people with the issue.
Anyhow, the only solution I found is to format the drive on a windows machine to FAT32 (if you need R/W support for both Mac & Linux/Windows).
The problem is that Tiger won't format an external USB drive. It's a pretty big bug IMO and I can't figure out why Apple won't fix it. It's not like a few people have experienced it, if you google I am sure you can find a good share of people with the issue.
Anyhow, the only solution I found is to format the drive on a windows machine to FAT32 (if you need R/W support for both Mac & Linux/Windows).
Yeah I've seen quite a few people having trouble, I'm just looking to format it for my Mac, i'm not worried about using it for a PC anymore.
Well, I tried to plug the hard drive into a PC & now it won't even recognize it. All I get is "USB Device Not Recognized", does anyone have any ideas about how i can get round this? It would be greatly appreciated.
No clicking noise. It's a Samsung HM100JC 2.5 external hard drive. I'm trying to find the drivers for it so I can try to run it on a PC again, would this be possible? If I can't use it with my Mac I'm a least hoping to be able to get it working so I can give it to a friend with a PC.
It might be possible. If it's a driver issue then it'd be fine with a PC but if it's a failing drive then I wouldn't rely on it for anything important. It might fail again at a more inopportune time.