Partitioning secondary internal hard drive failure

Question

Looks like my 2nd HDD became a brick. I tried to partition it via Disk Utilities/booted from recovery partition/diskutil to no luck!

I got vague/strange errors such as: unable to unmount, or:

Partition failed with the error:
Wiping volume data to prevent future accidental probing failed.

Is there any way to force the partition process, or somehow revive the hard drive??

Answer 1

Thank you all for your responses, but it seems that this is a Disk Utility/Lion bug with some 2nd/external drives.

The way it worked with me is to boot from a previous OS X version (Snow Leopard) via target-disk-mode and partition the drive from there without any problem!

Answer 2

It could be a physical death. This you can do nothing about. If your drive is making clicking (or any other unusual) noises, this is a serious hint for that solution.

Otherwise, try DiskWarrior. Commercial but worth it. It saved me many times from seemingly desperate situations. I owe it at least the life of my eMac, twice my main computer, and several friends'.

Answer 3

I see you have Techtool Pro (eDrive partition on your main drive). I'm not sure why it's grayed though. Techtool Pro has basic utility to check logical and physical structure of HDD, use it.

In case it's easy for you to take this HDD out and you have open PC desktop then I would recommend connect it by SATA and check it with MHDD utility.

Answer 4

The idea of forcing a drive (that I presumably want to trust) to format scares me. I wouldn't advocate pursuing this too far down the rabbit hole. However, I notice from the screenshot that there is no Partition Map Scheme defined for the drive. (Indicating this drive is either truly "blank" or really, really "borked".) Try clicking on the Options… button (located below the Volume Scheme: panel) and selecting the appropriate (most likely GUID) partition map.

Answer 5

One thing I have done in the past to (temporarily) revive a dead drive, is to stand it vertically rather than sit it flat. The read/write heads that extend in between the platters can often misalign, and gravity wants them to droop down. This is often the cause for clicking and other bad noises. If you stand the drives vertically (Try all 4 sides - you want to try to make the heada "dangle" down, rather than be stood on end etc), you may be able to get enough proper spin out of it to remove any data that me be required to be saved.

Obviously a backup is your friend in this scenario, although as you are wiping it, you are probably (hopefully) not in a position to be losing data.

One thing you can try is to check the SMART status (Apple > About this Mac > System Information - dig about) to see if it is reporting errors.

Answer 6

I ran into the same problem trying to set up a Hackintosh build on a new drive in my PC. The solution I used was to switch the Mac drive with my existing SSD which has Windows 7 so that the Mac one is first. This was a physical cable switch.