reformatting an external drive?

edX

edX

mac shaman
ok, for various reasons i'm planning on reformatting my 40 gb external FW drive. i'm a bit confused never having 're' formatted before. i get 2 versions of the names of each drive in disk utility. one, a very technical sounding one and the other my given name for it. the former allows me to choose to install os 9 drivers which i need and the latter does not. i assume i should format from the first one and type in the name which reads untitled (rather than repeating the same name as before like the second one)? i'll still end up with both id's when it's done, right?

i just want to be sure i'm doing this right and not making things worse instead of better. thanks.
 
You'll see in the top left corner of Diskutitlity window, as each item in the list is selected, each is displayed as a disk or volume. After formatting, all disks will display both a disk and at least one volume. You can select a volume, and erase that volume. Or you can choose the disk and erase (or format) the disk, and all volumes on that disk will be gone, or you can format, whilst creating new volumes in your choice of size and name. You do not need OS 9 drivers, unless you plan to use that drive to boot up with OS 9 (Classic mode will work just fine without OS 9 drivers).
 
thanks DeltaMac. that was a very clear description and the answer i was looking for. since i never partition, the differences between a disk and a volume weren't self evident to me. and i do use the disk to boot into os 9 regularly for repairs and maintenence on my internal so the drivers are very important to me.

and gia - no, i'll be copying/cloning everything back once i'm done. its the formatting itself that i want to change to see if it clears up a problem my other external doesn't have - stalling out while copying files from one disk to another.
 
ok, it's been reformatting since about 4:30 pm yesterday. time is now about 2 pm. the progress display is just the spinning barber pole still. should i be looking at a relative progress bar during this or is the barber pole all i should expect? i keep thinking it has stalled out as the activity light just stays on with no flicker, but then every so often it does show a flicker for a few seconds and then goes back to being fully lit, as it has done when stalling during file transfers to it. i know that doing the full low level format with zeros takes longer, but is this amount of time normal for a 40 gb drive? i don't really need to have it again real soon and could easily wait this out a few days if necessary but i am concerned i'm doing nothing but wasting cpu and making matters worse instead of better.
 
I've heard of this before with FW drives, seems like a little too long, have you given up on it yet? Might be (not good) (put appropriate expletive here) :( Try format again, with NO other FW devices attached, don't bother with all zeros, just a normal format, see if that will complete, If that is also nogo, then I would pull HD from that case and install in a G4 as a slave, and reformat through IDE bus, but maybe you don't have easy access to one if your equip is still the same
 
no, i haven't given up. i still want to know if the barber pole (diagonal lines) is what i should be seeing or if it should be showing a true progress bar during this process. if the barber pole is correct, i'll just keep riding it out. plus, how would i 'give up'? it's not like there is a stop button or menu choice. i would be somewhat concerned about force quitting a format without just cause and understanding of the consequences. would the drive even show up again?
and no, i don't have easy access to anything but another imac that is a 600 rather than a 400.
 
so nobody here knows what the progress/activity bar is supposed to look like during a reformat?

yes, it is still going. i have reniced it to -16, yet process viewer indicates it is using betwen 25-55% of my cpu with about 25% of my cpu remaining idle. using the latest version of Maintain, i have confirmed that various sized packets of data are constantly being sent and received thru my FW ports. it will run with the drive's activity light fully lit for about 20-40 mins at a time and then suddenly start flickering away for about a minute. during this time Disk Utlity stops any graphical activity and any other apps i have become temporarily unusable.
i would be more than glad to quit everything else and hand over all available cpu and memory to this task just to get it done (like os 9 allows) if i thought that would speed up this process.
 
c'mon!! somebody here please tell me what the status bar is supposed to look like. and yes, over 48 hrs later, it's still going. it's like the d@mn energizer bunny.
 
The barber pole should only last a few seconds, then graduate to the standard progress bar.

The odds are that the drive requires special software to reformat it (I've seen this on many third party SCSI drives) or that something is accessing the drive keeping the process from starting (like file sharing).

I would suggest trying again, but this time boot from the Mac OS X CD and then running Disk Utility on that drive. Running from the OS on the CD should remove any normal dependencies that the drive may have.

:rolleyes:

If that fails, check the web site of the maker for tools they may have or known problems.
 
Oh, you could also try unmounting the drive in the Finder first before trying if you really don't want to restart your system (like you are going for a record uptime or something like that).
 
ok so how do i safely end this process? just pull the plug? force quit Disk Utility? wait for a power outage?

and thanks David :)

(oh, and you should know i'm not an 'uptime' kind of guy :D )
 
It has been a while since I last formatted a drive (at least three days to a week), but isn't there a Cancel button?

Yes force quitting should work (it hasn't really done anything... and your just going to reformat it any way).

Best of luck.
 
no, no cancel button. perhaps because i am doing the write with zeros option?

and no, we don't have the blackouts anymore - plus i'm on a hospital grid so we never got them. but the storms seem to take it out every few weeks or so. :p

thanks again!!
 
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