Solving the Mystery of Disk Utility's Failure to Erase USB Drives
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Solving the Mystery of Disk Utility's Failure to Erase USB Drives
…After 45 minutes of Googling and cursing, I finally realized that the Iomega enclosure had both FireWire 400 and USB 2 interfaces. I dug out a FireWire cable, plugged it in, and all was golden. I was able to erase and partition at will. (An unrelated issue also widely discussed was that you might need to change the partition type from Apple Partition Map in the Partition section's Options dialog; GUID Partition Table is generally the right choice since Tiger.)
I later found some additional background advice on this topic from other users: there's clearly some incompatibility introduced in Leopard that prevents Mac OS X from talking over certain USB drive interfaces.
Based on comments and discussions all over Mac sites dating back to the release of 10.5 Leopard, you have three choices:
- Switch to FireWire. That only works, of course, if there's a FireWire interface.
- Boot off a 10.4 Tiger installation disk, and use Disk Utility while booted. That's a slightly tedious but nifty option, although it won't work for machines too new to allow a Tiger book.
- Remove the drive and put it into another enclosure, preferably one with a FireWire interface.
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