Trouble Formating External HD with Mac osx took 10 hours and hanged

[csammut]

I have a problem. I just bought a samsung HD and installed it exterally using USB case. I attached it to my mini mac (Intel). A popup screen came up giving me the option to ERASE the new hard drive which I assumed it is what to use inorder to format a new HD. I choose to format it using Mac extended (Journaled). I gave it a volume name and clicked on start. 10 hours later and there was still no progress bar, only a rotating colour wheel for all that time.
I turned the exteral HD off and all of a suden a new window poped up saying that HD could not be found cannot format.

What can I do at this stage. This had happened to me with another HD and did the same exact thing.

Please help me

 

[macworks]

What version of OS X are you using? Why aren't you using FireWire?

Plug the drive in and open Disk Utility to see if the drive is listed there. If you've set the options in disk utility to something other than the default, it may take a while for the formatting to finish. Otherwise it should take under 1 minute.

 

[sbkp]

I have the same trouble. It's a USB enclosure because that's the one I wanted. I haven't waited 10 hours, but there's no progress bar. Disk Utility shows the drive just fine, but Erasing it seems to go nowhere.

Thanks,
Stefan

 

[sbkp]

Tech support on the drive enclosure eventually determined that there's a USB problem in OS-X 10.4.5 and up. I took the enclosure to a neighbor's house with an older OS-X installation, and it formatted in 30 seconds.