MBP 2010, Samsung 850 EVO, Sierra

[fredfrog]

HELP!!!
Bought 1Tb 850 Evo to use as replacement for an internal moving drive.

Just gone to Sierra (some things different).

I have an external Rugged Drive with Firewire 800 and to move drives around I open the case of this drive and put any SATA drive in and always worked fine (until this time). Put the Evo in the external case and plugged into FW800 port on the Macbook (FW to SATA happens inside the Rugged drive). This time I get

"The disk you inserted is not readable by this computer: initialise/ignore/eject".

Initialise takes me to Disk Utility. Within Disk Utility the disk appears and DI shows "First Aid/Erase/Restore/Info"

"Partition" is greyed out.

I'm lost. What's the best way to proceed ? Should I run something provided by Samsung on the CD (every former disk I discarded this kind of stuff because its often aimed only at windows machines). What will Repair or Restore do ?

"Info" gives me the following:

Volume type : Unknown
BSD device node : disk2
Connection : FireWire
Device tree path : IODeviceTree:/PCI0@0/RP03@1C,2/FRWR@0/node@d04b8204067adb/sbp-2@c000
Writable : No
Is case-sensitive : No
Volume capacity : 1,000,204,886,016
Available space (Purgeable + Free) : 0
Purgeable space : 0
Free space : 0
Used space : 1,000,204,886,016
Owners enabled : No
Is encrypted : No
Can be verified : No
Can be repaired : No
Bootable : No
Journaled : No
Disk number : 2
Media name : Ext Hard Disk Media
Media type : Generic
Ejectable : Yes
Solid state : No
S.M.A.R.T. status : Not Supported

Andy

 

[CoastalOR]

You should "Erase" (format) for Mac Extended (Journaled) first, then you can Partition after completing the erase.

 

[fredfrog]

You should "Erase" (format) for Mac Extended (Journaled) first, then you can Partition after completing the erase.

Thanks: BUT - Erase worked but partition still greyed out. Permissions thing ?

andy

 

[CoastalOR]

Thanks: BUT - Erase worked but partition still greyed out. Permissions thing ?

You need to select the hardware name of the device (example: Samsung SSD 850...) and not the volume name you created when you erased it. The hardware name should also be selected the first time it is erased so the devices partition is set to GUID.

 

[fredfrog]

How silly of me (oops). Thank you CoastalOR. Interestingly I *think* there already *is* a single partition. The gui for the partition command is very different from El Capitan - its meant to be intuitive but its not because its ambiguous as to whether there already is one. Do you know, is there a way to use command line tools to discover ? When I use "partition" (in the diskutility gui) it looks strongly like there is a partition there but the option to create one requires increasing to two partitions (admittedly resizable). "Mount -v" tells me its mounted so I believe its created the partition for me without asking. -andy

 

[CoastalOR]

Typically when you buy a new drive it formatted for Windows, so that is the volume partition you see. If you do the Erase from the top hardware name then it will automatically create a single GUID partition. You only need the Partition tab if you want to create more than one partition.

My experience is that using the Terminal CLI can result in an even more ambiguous result to people that are not experienced with Terminal.

An easy way to check with Disk Utility is to select the top hardware name and look at the bottom table. The Partition Map: needs to be GUID Partition Map. If you see anything else, like MBR (Master Boot Record) which is what you see in a Windows partition, then you will know it is the wrong partition table for Mac. I just automatically do a top level Erase to any new drive to make sure.

 

[fredfrog]

Thanks CoastalOR, you've been very helpful. That's all cleared up, cloned, will boot (externally). I have some other, more serious worries which I'm going to post on a separate thread (I also run an old linux under an old vmware and need it for updates to my server). Your input on those worries would be very useful. -andy