Mac OS X fails when trying to format external HDD

Mac OS X fails when trying to format external HDD

I have an Iomega Prestige desktop hard drive (1 TB) which I purchased from Amazon. I connect it to my white Macbook (purchased late 2007, 2.14 GHz with 2 GB Ram), open Disk Utility. I click the single partition on the disk, choose "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" for the Volume Format and leave the name as-is. When I click "Erase", I get the following error after only a few seconds:

Asked by: Guest | Views: 350

Total answers/comments: 2

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Guest [Entry]

"Just for the sake of having an answer here, this is what ended up fixing the problem:

Connected the disk to a windows XP machine
Deleted the existing FAT32 partition that the device shipped with using Disk Management under XP.
Connected it to the Mac, partitioned and formatted without issue.

I won't make this the selected answer unless somebody upvotes it, and I'll make the question community wiki."

Guest [Entry]

What was the format of the disk? It's possible that you needed to select the entire drive (that is, repartition the drive) instead of the single partition? Not sure why that would be, but it's usually what I do for brand new drives.