Interesting Formatting Trick for WD My Book 1TB Drive
Friday evening we went to pick up my fixed iMac G5 from the OakBrook Apple Store and I've been setting it up, and updating it over the weekend. Yesterday, I went to Best Buy and got a nice My Book 1TB drive for Time Machine on this guy. The drive was in the $260 range, and had USB and Firewire 400 ports - nice drive.
So I got it hooking up and I wanted to reformat it as a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) filesystem for Time Machine (and anything else I wanted to throw on there), but when I tried to do that, I kept getting a formatting error, and it'd just stop.
Hmmm...
I finally open up the log for Disk Utility and say this error message:
newfs_hfs: /dev/rdisk1s1: partition size not a multiple of 4K.
That's very odd. I hadn't seen that before, and I've formatted a lot of this style of drives in the past. I wonder what it was. If I formatted is as FAT32, it worked fine. But I didn't want that. I wanted Mac OS Extended (Journaled). So I had to hit Google.
The solution was not obvious, and yet clear as day once you know what to look for. The trick was in the partitioning of the drive and the 'Options...' button at the bottom. The default from the factory had it with a DOS-based MBR selected, and I needed to select the GUID (for Intel Macs) or the APM (for PPC Macs). Once I did that, then the format was clean and quick, and it's working fine.
Interesting how the defaults play into these things. Glad to have hit it, and figured it out.