WD Elements Drive will not format to Mac OS Extended Journaled.

[Tony Lush]

New (December 2017) WD Elements Drive will not format to Mac OS Extended Journaled. Having attempted this now says "Erase process failed" and has called the disk" Disk 2s1" and is all greyed out. I want to use this new disk as a time machine backup disk. Any suggestions on how to rectify this problem? On Purchasing this disk it did say that it was only for windows but so have all the disks I have purchased and used as time machine back up in the past. I am using Mac OS High Sierra 10.13.02

Thanks

Tony Lush

 

[Fishrrman]

Does the WD drive have any kind of proprietary software installed on it?
Such as a custom partition, etc? Custom drivers (that might prevent Disk Utility from "reaching" the entire drive so that you could erase it)?

Some pre-packaged drives come this way.
On those that do, there's usually some mfr-provided software which can be used to remove the "proprietary stuff".

 

[IHelpId10t5]

New (December 2017) WD Elements Drive will not format to Mac OS Extended Journaled. Having attempted this now says "Erase process failed" and has called the disk" Disk 2s1" and is all greyed out. I want to use this new disk as a time machine backup disk. Any suggestions on how to rectify this problem? On Purchasing this disk it did say that it was only for windows but so have all the disks I have purchased and used as time machine back up in the past. I am using Mac OS High Sierra 10.13.02

Thanks

Tony Lush

I have used many Elements drives and love them. However, I have seen this formatting issue many times. Although I have never figured out exactly what causes this glitch, you can overcome it by simply trying the formatting and/or repartitioning several times until it works. I recommend trying to first reformat as MBR/FAT, and then try going to GPT/Mac OS Extended Journaled. What's odd is that I once did eight new WD Elements drives in a siting and had to mess with two of the eight whereas the other six formatted immediately. I was eventually able to get them all to format with some tinkering in DiskUtility.

Does the WD drive have any kind of proprietary software installed on it?

The nice thing about the WD "Elements" model is that it's just about the ONLY remaining WD model that is really a bare disk and does not have firmware-based utility partitions that are impossible to remove. The "Elements" models are the only WD externals that I will buy any more for this reason.

 

[YatBob]

What worked for me is to Format it MS-Dos Fat then come back and reformat it Mac OS Extended Journal

 

[PopoBot]

I know this is an old thread, but I hit this issue when reformatting WD externals every time. And in my case it's a simple fix.

If I include a space in the new drive's name when erasing through Disk Utility, it always gives me "Erase process failed" without any reason why. I always forget about this when I get a new external, and then through trial and error I end up trying to do a name with no spaces and it works. Then I simply rename the drive afterwards. Other people's issues may be more complex, but at least in Sierra and High Sierra, I hit this "space" issue every time.