Disk size shrank after refomat

G

Guest

Guest
Friend has Iomega 1 terabyte USB external containing 2 500gig Seagate SATA drives.

It was supplied formatted for Windows but the manual suggests reformatting under Apple.

Unfortunately the manual didn't mention that this could take a little time. After 4 hours my friend decided something was wrong and turned the drive
off.

Unsurprisingly, on next connecting it to the Apple, no disk could be found.
Same when I connected to my PC's USB -- nothing visible in My Computer. though Device Manager seemed to recognise the drive.

I took the Iomega apart and reformatted the drives individually on an XP PC but have now found that the 500 gig drives are now only 137 each.

I'm hoping that when the drive is connected to the Apple again it will also be recognised and when reformatted may hopefully be restored to a Terabyte but I fear some translation software was involved and this has been erased.

Any thoughts ?
 

sub mesa

Distinguished
XP is very old and cannot access disks larger than 128/137GB without having at least SP1 or higher.

Is it a RAID or JBOD? In that case you should pay special attention when you are able to see 2 disks; you should only be able to see one RAID disk of 1000GB.

Does the Iomega drive have any switches that allows for different RAID modes?

4 hours formatting is normal. Each drive is about 2 hours when directly connected to the PC. With USB2 you have about 1/3rd the speed; so formatting one disk takes 6 hours. If its a JBOD then the formatting will take twice as long; 12 hours with USB2.
 
G

Guest

Guest
As it's not my drive I'm not too familiar with its spec. The circuit board doesn't have have any obvious physical switchces.

Presently can only see it as one drive -- but not 2x the maximum XP capacity you mention.

Hopefully Apple's OS X (which ever iteration of that he has) can clear up this mess.
 

505090

Distinguished
Sep 22, 2008
1,575
0
19,860
if it's a one terabyte drive with two 500's inside it's supposed to be a raid array, meaning you have to rebuild the array not just randomly format the dives and put them back. Contact the manufacturer for detail I couldn't find it on their site.

Once you figure the raid issue out and get to formatting fat32 will work for both mac and pc, unless he only has macs in the house in which case the apples propitiatory system will likely have more features
 
G

Guest

Guest
Thanks for the replies guys -- I expect it will need help from the manufacturer but I'm not optimistic because I lack a computer/OS of the right vintage and I know little about Raid or Macs.

I'll suggest that as an alternative he removes one drive and, hopefully can reformat that under Mac OS back up to the full 500gig and physically swaps the bare drives when the first is full.

Also looking at a SATA 3.5 dock (if such a thing is yet available for the Mac).

He'll need something beyond Fat32 -- the issue first arose because of file size limitations when saving movie footage to the Iomega.
 

505090

Distinguished
Sep 22, 2008
1,575
0
19,860
as long as you have sp2 or 3 you can set the drives up, just do it in fat32. then take it to your friends and he can switch it to apples system with his mac.

another thought don't know if it will work, but what if you delete all the partition and just load the raw disks into the enclosure
 

Paperdoc

Polypheme
Ambassador
My VERY strong suspicion is that the "1 TB Iomega" unit that actually contains 2 x 0.5 TB HD units inside is using either RAID0 or JBOD to combine those two units so that the outside world sees them as one. In either case you cannot Partition and Format each drive unit separately outside the case and then re-install them. The Partition and Format operations need to be done on the complete Iomega unit, allowing its internal disk controller to do the operations its own way.

I suggest you start with 505090's point. Undo what you've done as best you can. Install each of the 500 GB units in your machine and use Disk Management to Delete any and all Partitions on both HDD's, so they are as much like new empty disks as possible. Then re-install them in the Iomega case.

Now connect the Iomega unit to a computer and try a Partition and Format on the unit. Forget that it has two HDD's inside. Let the unit itself take care of the details and continue to present itself as ONE drive. You might try this on a PC, or you might go directly to the Apple machine.

Now, I'm hoping that will work. BUT it may be that the Iomega box actually needs some utilities run on it to restore it to the "factory new" state in which it normally arrives. So if the computer cannot do the Partitioning, etc, get hold of Iomega's Tech Support people for help.
 
G

Guest

Guest
I've reformatted it into Fat32 rather than NTFS and if that doesn't work with the Mac will then delete partitions.

Or hand it over to an IT Manager friend who has offered to fix it for my mate (who already owes me several favours for the 10 hours of my time NOT fixing it has taken so far)

Thank you to all -- and please feel free to add further.