# trouble formatting wd my book essential



## katsnfish (Apr 2, 2009)

I have a 500GB WD my book essential and am trying to change it from FAT32 to OS Extended (journaled). (I think...)  I had one previously that I did not change and encountered problems when saving video to it -- it would save about an hour, then cut off.  I reformatted that one but, of course, lost all of my data.  Then a few months later the drive stopped being recognized by my computer. (Any ideas why?)  I sent it back and had a new one sent to me.  (WD was very prompt about that.)  

Anyhow, I am trying to start this one out on the right foot and format it correctly.  However, when I go through the steps and finally get to partitioning the drive, the partition fails with the error -- Could not unmount disk.  When I tried to verify the disk, I got this message:  Verify volume failed with error Could not unmount disk.

What should I do??


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## edadams (Apr 3, 2009)

Hi
Yes I have seen this before, try disconnect drive, wait 5sec, re-connect drive, once it shows up drag it to trash. If this fails wait 5 minutes and then drag to trash. Hopefully it will allow you to unmount disk by dragging to trash. Once its unmounted the use disk utility to format.
Ed


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## katsnfish (Apr 3, 2009)

Thank you, that solved the problem and the drive is now working. I just hope it keeps working!!


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