alternative reformating methods?

baskew

baskew

Registered
Is there an alternative way to reformat an external drive other then diskutility?

Disk Utility is freezing about 1/4th the way threw when it's writing zero data on the drive, I'm assuming its a bad sector, because Disk Warrior does the same thing when I'm running it on the drive...

I'm just trying to find a way to get the drive back to 100% clean/defragmented/rid of bad sectors.
 
If initializing the drive borks the disk utility, it's not a good sign about the drive.
Try booting to your Panther installer CD, and run disk utility from the Installer menu. Also, make sure the drive you are formatting is the only external drive attached. One of your drive enclosures could be flaky, so try that drive installed in the other enclosure (you do have more than one, don't you?) If you still have problems, then likely the drive needs to be replaced.
 
If Disk Utility or any other utility encounters a bad block on the drive, it may appear to freeze, but chances are that it's not frozen -- it's simply trying to remap the bad block onto a good one. The progress bar may stop moving and you may not be able to move the windows... the process may be sucking so many CPU cycles that the system may seem unresponsive.

If you're writing zeros to a drive suspected of having bad blocks, your best bet is to let the reformat process run overnight (and sometimes longer). I've seen a 20GB drive take 4 hours to do a complete zero format, so if your drive is larger than that, it could take even longer.
 
When you are having drive problems such as you describe, in Disk Utility, be sure and check the S.M.A.R.T. status of your drive. (Select the drive then look at the lower right corner of the Disk Utility window frame.) If, the S.M.A.R.T. status is anything other than verified run, do not walk, to your nearest computer store and purchase a new hard drive. The one you have will fail completely much sooner than later.

TechTool Pro 4 will also report the S.M.A.R.T. status in much greater detail than Disk Utility.
 
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