# Can't initialize WD External Drive



## Macrsd (Aug 16, 2008)

My Mac's Disk Utility wont recognize my WD 115 Gig external drive - I want to use the external as a backup to files on my Mac - below is the sequence of what I did while trying to get the Mac to read the drive

1. After connecting the drive to my Mac - USB directly into the computer - I powered up the Mac and got a dialogue box that said Initialize, Ignore or Eject - when I chose Initialize it opened the Mac's Disk Utility where you erase or partition the drive to be recognized - I tried to both erase and initialize the external - I erased the drive with no luck and then initialized the drive by selecting the drive from the sidebar and chose Partition (I saved it as a Mac Extended Journaled drive with 1 partiton) - but all I got was the spinning ball that would go on for as long as 15 minutes - After restart the Disk Utility recognized the external but it still didn't show on the desktop

2. I then booted up from my original Mac OS 9 CD and successfully initialized the drive - there were only two options for that - Mac Standard and Mac Extended - I chose extended - When I'm in boot up mode from the CD the external does show up on the desktop without any files on it so I assume that the computer does read the external - I opened the Drive Setup Utility and chose List of Drives where it lists the with Bus numbers - My Mac is is listed as Bus 2 while the external is 0 it also says the external is "not supported" - There was also a yellow sticky like note in the upper corner of the computer that said "Complete functionality of USB devices is not available from start up CD" so I feel there is something wrong there and initializing the external from the OS 9 CD did something bad - I'm currently trying to figure out if the jumper setting on the external is correct - there seems to be special instructions for the Mac in the WD drive literature - it recommends to set it as a slave configuration - also if the Bus setting is 0 does that mean it's not recognized or is not connected or is there a legitmate Bus setting of 0 - I don't know just a thought

3. When I restarted the Mac and opened up Disk Utility it takes a while to get started - it says gathering disk information - it finally loads about 7 minutes later but the only thing I get in the sidebar is my hard drive and no external - so it's not even showing up there anymore - so something happened when I initialized the external from the CD as it wont recognize it in the Disk Utility




Macintosh G4 
CPU: 400 MHz
Mem: 576mb
Hard Drive: 19.1 G
Bus speed: 100MHz
8 years old
Mac OS X System 10.4.11
Western Digital internal drive in an external housing 115 Gig external drive


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## Frida (Aug 25, 2008)

Is the external drive powered by a separate power supply? Problems can occur if you have a bus powered drive and the bus can't provide enough power to run it. Does it have a FireWire port? If so, try that. Also, the WD drive is probably formatted for PC using a 'Master Boot Record'. If you can get the drive to appear in DiskUtility (preferrably in OS X, otherwise in OS 9), reformat it with one partition and in the 'Options' (at the bottom of the 'Partition' tab) select 'Apple Partition Map'.


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## Macrsd (Aug 25, 2008)

thanks for your reply - I've given up however and bought a 250G HD Passport Essential and all my problems have been solved - thanks again


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