Brand new WD 3TB Essential problems

Hi Everyone,

I have a problem that I am hoping you can help me with. I just bought a new 3TB drive that I was going to use on my Mac.  When I brought it home and plugged it into my Mac I opened disk utility and proceeded to reformat and partition the drive into two drives.  

My plan was to have one 2TB partition for Time Machine and the other 1TB was going to be formatted in MS-DOS (FAT) format for backing up and storage of other files, etc. that I use through Parallels, etc.

My hardware is:

MacBook Pro 2.9 GHz Intel Core i7

8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3

OS: Mountain Lion

Parallels 8 with Windows 8

I am sure that most of that info doesn’t matter, but…

After the initial partitioning of the drive everything seemed to be fine.  I opened up Time Machine and set it up to start backing up.  The other day I started getting notifications that Time Machine couldn’t back up to the drive.  When I tried to find the drive in Finder I couldn’t.  Since then I have done everything that I can think of.  I finally ran the firmware updater and updated the firmware of the drive out of frustration and now I can’t reformat, etc.  

I keep getting an error saying:

Partition Failed

Partition Failed with Error

Unable to write to the last block of the device.

Have I done something wrong, or is this just a bad drive?  Thanks for your help.  

Len

You have other options

you can format HFS and use and application called Catacombae - HFSExplorer  to use on the Windows side

or you can format NTFS and use NTFS 3G to read on the Mac

Download NTFS-3G 2011.1.15 Free - Free read/write NTFS file-system driver for your Mac - Softpedia

Thanks for the reply, but I can’t even access the drive or re-format.  I am assuming that it is a faulty drive, but I wanted to make sure I am not doing something wrong.

Can you see the drive in disk utilty? If you can try to repair the drive using disk utility. Or erase the drive, how ever this will delete all the files that are inside the drive. Also try reformating it using windows.

Thanks for the reply.  I appologize because I forgot to update this inquiry.  The drive did end up to be defective.  I took it back to Future Shop and the replacment drive has been formatted and partititioned and it is working perfectly.

Thanks.