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Product: WD My Passport Ultra 1TB

Operating Systems: Mac & Linux

I recently used my WD Passport for a linux system. I formatted this drive in linux to ext4. Now I want to use this drive for my mac again but am having problems formatting this drive using disk utility to hfs.

For some reason I can read/write and format this drive fine on linux. Also when viewing this drive in Disk Utility there are multiple instances of this drive.

Picture of Disk Utility Errors

Unmounting disk
Creating the partition map
Waiting for partitions to activate
Formatting disk5s1 as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with name Untitled
newfs_hfs: 
WriteBuffer:  pwrite(3, 0x104ae4000, 1048576, 331354112): Input/output error
newfs_hfs: write (sector 647176): Invalid argument

Mounting disk
Could not mount disk5s1 after erase

EDIT #1

Palaeologus helped me find a solution to formatting the drive.

sudo su
diskutil list
cat /dev/random > /dev/diskX

Look for the drive and replace X with drive number. Then format drive as FAT.

diskutil eraseVolume ExFAT MyName diskX

Once again replace X with disk number.

The drive is now assessable. However I can only format the drive to FAT and not JHFS, formatting to JHFS returns the same error as described at the top of the post.

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1 Answer 1

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These two users (here and here) seem to have had the same problem you're currently facing, which in both cases appears to have issues with the connectors.

If that's not the case (or at least before you go out to buy new connectors), you could try formatting the drive from terminal as in this solution and see if that solves the issue?

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  • Thank you Palaeologus, I formatted my drive using the cat /dev/random > /dev/disk4 and in terminal formatted the drive to fat and it works fine. However if I try to format to hfs w/ journaling the formatter fails and says: could not write to last block of drive. This is a bit problematic?
    – Vincent Ye
    Commented Mar 7, 2017 at 15:16
  • I'm unsure what to do from this point unfortunately - hopefully someone else will be able to provide a follow-up solution to your problem
    – Palaeologus
    Commented Mar 10, 2017 at 10:45
  • I had the same errors with 3 different hard drives inside a sata adapter kit (hardwrk.com/produkte/macbook-ssd-hdd-adapter-kit). Finally a new Sata Cable fixed it :)
    – spierala
    Commented Dec 17, 2019 at 23:05

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