I recently bought at Western Digital My Book 1 TB Hard Drive for my MacBook Pro. I wanted to use it for Time Machine backups, which meant that I needed for format it as Mac OS Extended. It came pre-formatted as FAT.
I used Disk Utility to partition it and got an error a few seconds into it.
The error window said: “Partition failed. Partition failed with error: File system formatter failed”.
After pulling my hair out for a while, I finally figured it out…
I’m not exactly sure the reason why, but Mac OX has an issue with a “Master Boot Record” bigger than 512mb. Luckily the solution is easy.
1. Open up Disk Utility.
2. Select your drive on the left hand side.
3. Then click on the “Partition” tab.
4. Choose Volume Scheme: “1 Partition” and select the format: “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”
5. Then click on the “Options” button.
6. Here is the important part. Choose “GUID Partition Table” instead of “Master Boot Record”. Then click “OK”.
7. Now click “Apply” to start the partition process. That’s it!
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August 11th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
Thanks for posting this! Couldn’t figure out why it wouldn’t just format.
November 2nd, 2009 at 1:11 am
Great info for those buying these WD Drives. They’ve been on sale for a while now in my area.
One note, I think the issue is with MBR Partitions larger than 512 “GB” not “MB”. I have a 250GB drive set up as MBR running my OS and have never had a problem. My 2nd (internal) and 3rd (external) drives were both setup as GUID, so I never ran into what you saw. Good job for finding a solution!