So, for those that remember way back when I first bought a networked/USB external 200Gb drive, I’m having problems again.  The enclousure itself has finally died on me, and when hooking the drive up via IDE inside my mom’s Dell, the drive is just fine.  So, I purchased a new external USB case that supports a 200Gb drive.  Hook it up to my Mac and everything was just fine.

However, I wanted to format the drive to get two partions and just get rid of all the junk that was on it.  This is where the problem comes in.  The mac wouldn’t even recognize the disk, so I had to “initialize” it in Windows.  Then Disk Utility sees the disk and it just needs to be partitioned.  Leaving that alone, it will hang up in about 5 seconds and never does a thing, and I’ve left it alone for about 12 hours at the longest stretch.  Nothing.

I’ve read all over the net about problems like this with Firewire enclousures and can’t find a firmware update or anything to my case (Vantec NexStar GX).  So, just wondering if anyone has any suggestions, possibly another partitioning program available for the Mac?  I want an HFS+ partition, but just can’t get it.  Also, I read that a couple people got it working simply by using the version of Disk Utility that comes with Panther instead of Tiger.  Any truth to that?