It’s that time again for me, where I upgrade the home file server and re-purpose some old hard drives. And with the upcoming Time Machine backup program in the upcoming MacOS X 10.5, an external 300GB drive makes a lot of sense here.
But, oddly, Disk Utility won’t format the darn thing. The drive was on a linux server, and it sees it, lets me configure the partition, but then it hangs forever, not apparently doing anything.
Some searching turned up this excellent article , or actually, the second comment. It describes the exact problem, and points out that you can format the drive nearly instantly in windows with the MacDrive tool from MediaFour .
Download the trial version and install it, it does the trick (limited to 5 days though). I did this in Parallels, actually. If you want to do it this way, force-quit your hung Disk Utility window, then remove and reconnect the drive. Start Parrallels, install the software, then click on the little usb icon in the bottom left corner of your window and capture your external drive (listed as “PATA IDE Bridge” for me). Then run MacDrive, format it (took 60s), release the drive from the usb tab and it should be mounted in your finder already.
The price is not even unreasonable, $50 or $20 for an upgrade. I see old versions on ebay for as low as $1 if you want to be legal.