Hi. I have a Powerbook G4 running Mac OS X.4.7. I recently bought a 200 GB internal Seagate drive. (I put external in the subject line because I put it in an external enclosure.) When I try to partition the drive, Disk Utility locks up -- and stays locked up (say, overnight). As best as I can tell (by putting my ear up to the drive), there's no drive activity. I'm pretty sure the drive is healthy -- I was able to partition it on my PC. I'm pretty sure the connection is good -- once I partitioned it on the PC, I was able to mount it on the Mac. I just can't partition it on the Mac. I can't even format it -- that is, I can't convert an existing NTFS or FAT32 (or even `free space') partition to HFS+.
I had the same problem with the last hard drive I bought, except that that one I could format, once I'd first partitioned it using my PC. This one I just can't format at all, making it useless.
By the way, when Disk Utility hangs, it responds promptly to a kill -2; but the DiskManagementTool process it starts can't be killed, even with a sudo kill -9. In fact, it won't even stop when I shut down -- I have to do a hard shut down.
I had the same problem with the last hard drive I bought, except that that one I could format, once I'd first partitioned it using my PC. This one I just can't format at all, making it useless.
By the way, when Disk Utility hangs, it responds promptly to a kill -2; but the DiskManagementTool process it starts can't be killed, even with a sudo kill -9. In fact, it won't even stop when I shut down -- I have to do a hard shut down.