I don’t know why these hard drives are formatted like this but it is killing me. My brother ordered a 1TB Western Digital My Book external hard drive for The DotMatrix Project, and it came formatted as a MS-DOS (FAT) or better yet a FAT32. FAT32 is formatted so Mac and PC can work off the same drive and if you really want to get geeky check out the wiki of the FAT.

I tried to download the footage from the cameras via firewire in FCP and the capture kept crashing within a couple of minutes. It was frustrating. I switched capture scratch disks to an internal hard drive and guess what? It captured smoothly.

So I tried to format the 1TB drive from a FAT32 to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and the process would end within 5 seconds with an error. I had the same problem with an external Iomega 1TB USB 2.0 hard drive the other week. I couldn’t figure it out. Their support sucked, it stated the exact thing I was doing. Going to Disk Utility and selecting the hard drive and select the Erase tab and under the Volume Format pull down select the Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and click Erase. Did it and I got the same message.

Luckily Western Digital’s support page had the correct response and here it is.

In Mac OS X, you can use the built in Disk Utility to partition and initialize the drive so it will appear on the desktop.

1. Open the main drive (the drive that contains the operating system).

2. Open the Applications folder.

3. Open the Utilities folder.

4. Select Disk Utility.

5. The drives are displayed on the left side of the window. Click on the drive that you wish to partition (the top drive listing for the hard drive that you want to work with).

6. Once the drive is selected click on Partition.

7. Click on the Options button to select the partitioning scheme.

8. Click on Apple Partitioning Scheme or Apple Partitioning Map and then click on the OK button.

9. You will see several options for setting up the drive. Once you have selected the number of partitions, the format type you want, and a volume label, click the Partition button.

10. Following the completion of this process, the drive will appear on the desktop.

Now it is solved, it’s time to get some sleep and rest. I hope nobody else lost any sleep over this mess.

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