Comments on: Western Digital Drive with Leopard – “File system formatter failed.”

By: Jor

Jor — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 23:25:46 +0000

Thank you so much! I was really stumped.

By: matreve

matreve — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 18:01:41 +0000

I had a similar problem with my WD Passport 320GB portable drive. I tried the suggested solution. It did not work for me exactly but it guided me towards another solution (thank you so much!). My drive would not create the last partition (no matter how many partitions I would select it would create all but the last one where it would fail and it would always fail when I wanted to create just one). I finally figured it out. It looks like the OS system is trying to make partition(s) larger than total size of the disk. The solution that worked for me was to create 2 partitions: one that is slightly smaller that maximum size of the disk and the other one that is formatted as “free space”. In example my WD 320 GB was showing as total size of 320.07 GB. I created two partitions: Mac OS Extended partition for 318GB and second “Free Space” partition for the remaining space. This way the disk still shows as only one partition and you don’t loose a lot of space (free space could probably be even smaller).

By: Deacon

Deacon — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 02:59:36 +0000

Thanks so so so much for this! July 2011 and the advice is exactly what I needed!

By: Rachael Kelly

Rachael Kelly — Wed, 25 May 2011 12:54:08 +0000

My friend, you have just saved my sanity. Thank you so much!!!

By: Jason

Jason — Sat, 14 May 2011 00:59:43 +0000

Here we are, three years later, and this advice is still useful. Thanks!

By: Kerryn

Kerryn — Tue, 10 May 2011 13:45:49 +0000

What a joy to find such clear thnkniig. Thanks for posting!

By: BS

BS — Mon, 09 May 2011 22:13:44 +0000

You just made my day.

By: Nick

Nick — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 21:02:00 +0000

Perfect – I had a carbon copy of the original problem from 2008! Western Digital 1TB drive (Elements SE, USB2, bus powered).

This is my first WD drive and the first time I have EVER come across this problem when formatting a drive. Fail.

Whereas Jon, you are a diamond – I salute you.

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 06:18:56 +0000

Thanks so Much!

By: Miki

Miki — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 03:06:08 +0000

I also could not format my drive using USB connection,using OSX 10.6.5.
I always got the message in Disk Utility
‘POSIX reports: The operation couldn’t be completed. Cannot allocate memory’
but when I tried plugging it in using firewire, Disk Utility worked straight away.
If you have a USB/Firewire drve enclosure I woukd say this is the best solution.