After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I have come to the realisation that using Disk Utility in Snow Leopard 10.6.2 is not supported by the WD TV Mini. Reading other forums, websites and (*gasp) the manual, I already knew that the Mini could only recognise unjournalled HFS+ with an APM partition (not GUID). I was reformatting my drive after retasking it for another project - whatever. Did you think that formatting or partitioning in any combination of whatever would bloody work?! The Mini steadfastly refused to acknowledge the presence of the drive. I then realised that I had done some gnashing the first time, and was coincidentally working with my *new WD My Passport on my *old computer with OS X Tiger 10.4.11. Worked. First time. Same settings. Unjournalled Mac OS Extended file system on an APM partition.
Let this be a warning to you. Oh, and if I get any smartmouth attempts at “you should have bought a windows machine” I will personally come over and extract your left eye with a spoon.
Word up, Western Digital:
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Firmware 1.00.37 *needs to be updated to support the latest Mac OS X file system and partition.
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If you are unlucky enough to *only have Snow Leopard and want to format a new usb drive for use with Mini:
a. Phone a friend with an older version of Disk Utility. Haven’t tested Leopard. Don’t know. Tiger works.
b. Phone a friend with Windows - NTFS should work with big partitions and big files. Get MacFuse from Google.
c. Find yourself another solution and let us all know about it. Google. Witchcraft. Whatever.
- Or do what everyone else does, and blame Apple. This is not the most productive line of reasoning.
Now I’m going to bed.
