WD1200JB in Firewire cage formatting problems!

[Nero]

I just picked up a WD 1200JB, with the intent of replacing the 5400 60gb drive I've got in my Firewire enclosure. I replaced and installed the drive fine, and went about partition and formatting it. Because I need Mac compatability, I went with 4x FAT32 partitions. Now this is where is gets interesting. The drive itself is listed as 128gb. Now I found this odd, but went ahead and started making 32GB FAT32 partitions. Everything went fine until I got to making the last partition, where it keeps freezing at the 49%. I backed off the size of the last partition to 24gb, and then it froze @ 65%. I tried using NTFS on the last partition, but no dice. I'm baffled as to why there is a problem. The drive is well under the 137gb "barrier" experienced by my firewire drive's controller, so I assumed everyting would be ok.

Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but shouldn't the capacity of this drive be 117gb? Why would it be recognized as 128gb?

 

[llreye]

Assuming the drive likes being in that enclosure (i.e. has no porblems), and that your Mac can handle 32+GiB partition, have you tried a single partition?

I imagine the problem is with WinXP. And since you sound like you are using XP to format, it would be easiest to accomplish this by using a simple program like Partition Magic, and have the WD drive temporarily installed in your chassis.

I see 111.6GiB total on an older 5400RPM WD drive. I think you mean 120GB/120 000 000 000B. Though I would not be surprised to see size values vary between HDD families.

 

[Nero]

Me = idiot @ math. The actual capacity of my 120GB drive is 111.75GB (120 x 1,000,000,000 / 1,073,741,824 = 111.75 GB), though originally I though it was 117gb. What is even stranger is that the drive is still being detected as 128.00 actual GB.

I managed to successfully format 3 partitions for a total of 111.25 GB of storage (2 FAT32 and 1 NTFS).

The Macs I work with can totally handle FAT32 partitions greater than 32GiB, but Windows XP can't natively format paritions in FAT32 greater than 32GiB. I am going to hook the drive directly up to my mobo and use a utility other than XP's disk management to format the drive. If I knew exactly how to do it, I could also used Knoppix to format the drive without having to move the drive internally and install a 3rd-party utility.

 

[llreye]

Well, PartitionMagic and the various other partitioning programs should be able to work within Windows. I have not tried since I tend to make firmware/acoustic/speed adjustments when partitioning/formatting.

 

[cmcquistion]

Check out this thread:

http://www.ocforums.com/vb/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=250339

There is a product mentioned there, called BootItNG. I just downloaded and used this today. It isn't as pretty and idiot-proof as Partition Magic, but it is free (shareware.)