WD Elements 1TB hard drive and I Mac probs
 

Have just purchased this hard drive as £65 seemed OK price. The Elements icon seems to only come on screen when it feels like it some time after start up. Is that normal? I have updated firmware etc to latest version of OS X 10.4.11. Plugging/Unplugging the USB whilst trying to get the icon to appear causes computer to crash. Again is that normal? Anyone know? Ta!

Plugging and unplugging the drive shouldn't cause a crash. In what way is the machine crashing? Just completely freezing up?

What I would suggest is this:

1) power off the drive and the computer

2) Power on the drive, make sure USB and the AC Adaptor are both connected, ensure, the USB cable is plugged into the computer as well

3) Power on the computer, let it boot up to the Finder

4) Go into your Applications folder, then into the Utilities folder, find and launch Disk Utility

5) You should see your internal hard drive listed, plus it should also list your WD drive, click on the WD drive item. I'm going to assume at this point you have nothing of value on the WD external drive, if you do, you will want to copy it off.

6) Select the WD drive in Disk Utility, the right hand part of the screen will show you various options, and tabs. One of the tabs should be Partition, select it and you'll see how the disk is partitioned. There should be a little popup menu displaying "Current", click on this and select "1 Partition" from the menu. On the right it'll have a "Format" option with a menu next to it, if it is NOT set to "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" then click on the popup and select "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" from the list.

Click on the "Options" button down the bottom and make sure it's set to Apple Partition Map (unless you're going to make this a bootable disk and you have an Intel based Mac, in which case select GUID Partition Table), then click OK.

Then click the Partition button in the bottom right. This will re-partition the disk.

7) I think re-partitioning might do this, but it's worth doing anyway. Select the Erase tab, make sure the format is once again set to "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" and then click the "Erase" option, this essentially formats the drive.

Hopefully you should now have a properly formatted drive and it should appear on the desktop without any issue at all.

Can't help with the Mac but just to say that I was helping a friend out last night and he had the same external drive plugged into an HP laptop running Vista. We plugged/unplugged it several times and it just 'worked' ......

It was formatted as Fat32 if that makes any difference.

Dave

Thanks guys. Markus your excellent step by step partitioning and formatting guide seems to have sorted everything out.:thumb: Many thanks! Regarding secure erase options should I leave it on Don't erase data? Other options are Zero out data, 7-pass erase or 35-pass erase.

The crashing was strange. If I disconnected the usb it was like a dark stage curtain descending down the screen with a grey message square appearing I've not seen before with instructions to restart using power button. It basically crashed OS X. Not sure if it still does it. Will try.

No more crashing! :)

That's technically a Kernel panic.........

Something wasn't happy :D

Still, it's working now :)

DAn

The security options are only used when you erase the drive and they are primarily there to allow you to do a secure erase if you're planning on selling the drive, thus all data would be securely erased. For what we wanted to do a normal erase is perfectly fine and "don't erase data" is what you wanted.

As Dan states, what you saw was the Kernel Panic screen, think of it as the Mac's "Blue Screen Of Death", and it means something seriously bad happened, typically an app will crash and you'll get the crash reporter window popping up telling you app < insert app name > crashed, do you want to ignore, report or relaunch.

Glad to know it is all working for you now :)