Disk Utility does not format my Elements 1TB Hard Drive

[Vedic]

I have looked in the Apple forums for this and have seen several queries addressing this but none of the answers are working for me. Here is my issue :My IMac has actually died on me the other day and does not reboot. Spoke with Apple support and they determined my Operating System had become tarnished and that the only resolution was a absolute reinstall. To save my data the representative instructed walked me through installing the Operating System on an external HD. This has worked nice and I am at present working off that drive and have successfully to pull a lot of my data off the IMac's Hard Drive to that portable drive. But I have run out of storage; it was only 120GB and I have obtained about 144 GB of data left to recover. So I bought a WesternDigital Elements 1 TB external HD and wish to do the equivalent thing that I did with other drive But what happens with this drive is the moment I modify the Volume Scheme from "current" to "partition 1", all the choices and buttons go grey. So I an not able to click apply to make the changes. I have tried numerous different occasions and nothing is working. I have even attempted to just format it with the help of the "current" volume scheme but that shows me an error , somewhat about partition failed and also shows permission denied.

[switchblade327]

Hi , it seems a very long question though Just thinking whether you have in fact purchased a drive that's not compatible with the Mac. Searching at the Western Digital site they appear to split their drives into Mac-ready and Windows-ready , you can to go through it if you want to Given the issues you are having is it likely that Windows-ready will not work on a Mac and and the other way round . What is the possibility of changing it to a Western Digital Mybook - they certainly will work, without any problem .

[BansiJ]

There are a lot of speculations made as far as the partition is concerned , ifyou really want a nice suggestion , I will suggest you to seek the help from the Apple Support, they are going to help you in the most better way than any other than , I am saying so because it seems that you are not that much technical kind of a person so it will be better to ask the correct them and follow their footsteps .

[Vedic]

Just got off the device with Western Digital support and they were totally confused by this. When I narrated to the reply I was escalated to and I narrated that I am at present running the operating off an external HD, he commented he reckons that could be the reason it is not working and said that WD can't assist me any more if that's the situation . I am still waiting for a response from the Apple Support .

[Ceesar]

I am actually planning the same the drive I ordered does have that software on it, but since I have no much intentions for this drive in place of merely backing up files with Time Machine I will possibly just install their software and be happy if it works.If I may add my suggestion to this: you do not require any software on an external hard drive; if I was in your place , I would not install it. If needed, I would partition and format it accurately (thereby erasing the whole drive first) - in fact, I would possibly do that just to be certain even if it maintains to have been formatted already.