So, if you didn’t read my issues with all of these from the beginning, be sure to go back here and read the previous post for some background info. However, I have a solution that worked for me that was a mixture of others I found on the net as well as a comment on the previous post.

So, basically I have this 200Gb external USB disk that I couldn’t use because I couldn’t format it from Disk Utility on my Macbook. Disk Utility would just hang and never get a thing accomplished. So, I found a very good tip here from the great people over at MacOSXHints and that got me started in the right direction.

The basics of this tip was that you would need a Windows machine to just write the partitions out. You didn’t need to format them with Windows, but just initiliaze the disk and then create your partitions. Wasn’t that tricky, you use the built-in disk management that is located in the “Manage” contextual menu after you right-click on “My Computer”, at least on XP. So, I got that setup with no probs.

Hooking the drive backup to my Mac is where it got tricky. Disk Utility still wouldn’t play well at all, so I went with the Terminal approach. NOTE: diskutil from the Terminal has the same probs, don’t even try it.

newfs_msdos -v FAT_VOLUME_NAME -F 32 /dev/rdisk3s2

The above command formatted the second partition on my external disk as FAT32 so that I could easily share some stuff between Windows, Linux, and Mac. Great. Now to getting the majority of my disk as a Journaled HFS+ volume so I wouldn’t have to worry about filenames getting corrupted and would be able to enjoy all the great stuff with the filesystem. Hard to do my friends.

In the tip, there was another command to format the first volume. I ran that and got “Initialized HFS+ volume…” Sounds promising. In the tip the author also mentioned that his system picked up the FAT32 one, but he had to manually mount the HFS+ volume. Tried that with no sucsess, got an IOKit timeout error.

From here I went back to the drawing boards. I had heard of issues with Firewire drives and Oxford chipsets. This is a USB drive, so that ruled FW out and the chipset didn’t seem to be the problem for Windows, so I ruled that one out as well. Next, I’d heard reports that booting from your installation disk might work. I tried that with my Macbook’s DVD and got the same results (with Disk Utility and diskutil from a Terminal window).

I had heard that it was possibly related to an Intel issue, so I set off with a retail copy (10.4.2) of Tiger and tried doing the same things on my brothers older eMac. No luck with that either. The last thing I had left to try was the tip I’d read somewhere that Panther was the only thing some people could use to get it working. I didn’t have a Mac with Panther on it, so I had disregarded this tip earlier in the process. However, it just hit me that I did have a Panther CD lying around and that if I booted from that I would have a Terminal and Disk Utility as well. Guess what! Using Disk Utility from the Panther CD, I was able to easily format my HFS disk and all went as you would expect. The caveat of this approach is that evidently Panther won’t format FAT32 volumes, so you would still need to format this via a Windows machine, of back in Tiger (via the Terminal, still couldn’t get it working with Disk Utility at all).

A very long process for something that should be very easy to do.  I’m filing a bug report right now to see what the deal is, but hopefully this will help get someone else off on the right foot if you are having issues as well.