My guess is that the USB controller is not fully compatible with USB2.0. Those are just standart ways of formatting. Now thanks for reading me and thanks again for taking us ahead on. I was afraid that it could be my external drive that where down, but it seems that other people are experiencing the same problems. So bootable, 2 partitions and HFS+ are absolutely required. I’d better like not to have to return the hard drive to the merchant… And of course, I want to use it on OSX - Already have NTFS-3G driver installed to read-right the NTFS system, but I’m so narrow minded on this that I want to have an alternative bootable installation of OSX on it. If any one has further information or just a solution, it would be really great. Reformatting with OSX after that did the same fails. The only working but not nice work around where to format it with Windows. I did the thing with Disk Utility on 3 different Macs (iMac - MacBook Pro - MacBook / 10.6 & OSX 10.5 utd). Same frustration but it just reports that it failed. I also tried to use Drive Genius to initialize the disk. 02:59:41 +0100: Could not mount disk5 with name after erase 02:59:11 +0100: Initialized /dev/rdisk5 as a 931 GB HFS Plus volume with a 81920k journal 02:59:05 +0100: Système de fichiers : Mac OS étendu (journalisé) 02:59:05 +0100: Préparation de l’effacement : « Sans titre » 02:50:59 +0100: Préparation de la mise à zéro du disque : « Sans titre » 02:46:25 +0100: Erreur sur la partition : Permission denied 02:46:25 +0100: La partition a échoué pour le disque (null) Permission denied

02:45:41 +0100: Système de fichiers : Mac OS étendu (journalisé) 02:45:41 +0100: Schéma de partition : Tableau de partition GUID 02:45:41 +0100: Préparation de la partition du disque : « WD My Passport 0730 Media » Here is the Disk Utility log (sorry for the french report… one may focus on bold lines):

When Disk Utility is fed up with something, it alerts that I have no right to format the disk –end of all. The last I have in mind is the GUID scheme, 2 partitions (40Go - 900Go+) on HFS+. When partitioning, Disk Utility alerts with various messages depending on the scheme configuration. Rest of the time, it’s like the communication freezes between the OS and the hard drive or something. When the formating is over, the drive becomes so much instable that it’s available once in a while. Actually, there is a very annoying problem.

Format an wd my passport for a mac