Western Digital Drive with Leopard - “File system formatter failed.”
February 26, 2008 – 11:59 pmI just bought a 1TB Western Digital drive. I am stoked.
However, I tried to format the drive on my Mac (Leopard) and got the error “File system formatter failed” when I tried to format the disk as MacOS Extended (Journaled). Not cool.
I found this forum thread which suggested using multiple partitions to solve the problem. When I was trying this, I went into options and changed the partition scheme from Master Boot Record to GUID partition table. It formatted fine.
To test things further, I changed the scheme back to 1 partition, and left the format as GUID partition table. This time it worked flawlessly.
The GUID type says it will not work as a start up disk MacOS older than 10.4. So if you’re still on Panther you can’t boot up off my backup drive. Try not to cry too much.
6 Responses to “Western Digital Drive with Leopard - “File system formatter failed.””
Thank you. I was having this exact same problem (I still don’t understand why) and you fixed it.
Thanks for saving me some hair!
By Allen on Mar 20, 2008
Thanks– same here!
By Thomas on Apr 3, 2008
Awesome, happy to help.
By jon on Apr 3, 2008
Thanks for the reminder, that Master Boot Record vs. GUID option is kind of hidden.
This was the second hit on Google for the error message and it was just what I needed.
By ejk on Apr 11, 2008
Thanks !!
By nico on Apr 14, 2008
I had similar problem…formating to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) a 750GB USB drive spiraled for an hour before I found this page.
I did the partition/GUID thing (after killing Disk Utility and crossing my fingers) and it seemed to work…did a Verify Disk twice and both times said “appears to be OK”. For those looking for (like I was) how long this stuff should take (since its a big drive and all); IT WORKS REALLY FAST WHEN IT WORKS! (i.e. seconds, not hours)
….ok, trying to copy a couple of >4GB files to the drive…seems to work…but Im really paranoid, so doing a “cmp” of the two files via Terminal….IT WORKED!! YEA!!
By bruce on May 3, 2008