Fix a Western Digital My Book drive formatting problem

Sep 10, '08 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: bschmwsii

Twice now I have had problems formatting a new Western Digital My Book external drive under 10.5.x. Disk Utility fails to format the drive as Max OS X Extended Journaled with a "Format failed..." message. The first time this happened, I found an obscure firmware update at Western Digital's forums. This time, I found a quicker solution in this thread over at macForums. Here's a short executive summary version:

  1. Open Disk Utility and select your drive.
  2. Go to the Partition tab, name the drive as you wish, and choose one partition. Partition the drive.
  3. Select the partition you just created. Go to Options (on the bottom of the dialog window) and select GUID Partition Table/OK, then click Apply.
That's it; you can now format the drive successfully.

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