I have a brand new Memorex TravelDrive 64GB USB disk which is being troublesome.
It's formatted FAT16 on MBR, which is not so nice, and I'd like to put it on HFS+.
I've tried to do this through the Erase and Partition tabs in Disk Utility, as well as from the CLI in Terminal.app via a couple different methods:
$ diskutil partitionDisk disk4 1 GPT HFS+ newdisk R
$ diskutil eraseDisk HFS+ newdisk disk4
In those, disk4
represents the special device or disk identifier (i.e., /dev/disk4
) and newdisk
is the arbitrary name I'm giving the new volume on the disk.
In all cases, the process hangs trying to unmount the disk. I've done a bit of investigation, to no avail:
Tailing the Disk Utility log while it's running (
tail -f ~/Library/Logs/DiskUtility.log
) doesn't provide any useful information. All I see is:Starting next Erase job: 6 with no options 2013-03-03 00:51:57 -0500: Preparing to erase : “newdisk” 2013-03-03 00:51:57 -0500: Partition Scheme: GUID Partition Table 2013-03-03 00:51:57 -0500: 1 volume will be created 2013-03-03 00:51:57 -0500: Name : “newdisk” 2013-03-03 00:51:57 -0500: Size : 63.92 GB 2013-03-03 00:51:57 -0500: File system : Mac OS Extended (Journaled) dmAsyncStartedForDisk for disk4 2013-03-03 00:35:30 -0500: Unmounting disk
and it hangs there, thus having me need to "Stop Progress" from the Debug menu after 20 or 30 minutes.
Trying to figure out if something has hold of the disk for some other purpose doesn't reveal anything either --
ps aux | grep fsck
returns only one process:ryan 4967 1.0 0.0 2432768 588 s003 R+ 12:57AM 0:00.00 grep fsck
Anyone have thoughts on how to figure out what's going on here?
fdisk
as an MBR disk and then use Disk Utility on it. May be the factory-set FAT partition is causing problems.