I'm trying to format a 150 gig USB HDD on MOS in order to use it as am external backup unit. But when I try to format in MOS 3.2 it takes forever (reached only 0,4% done after 30 minutes!) and it also demands a lot of CPU power. It simply cannot be good for the G5 Powermac to use 90% CPU for 100 straight hours!

Is there a better way to format (I forgot to mention, quick format doesn't work)? Either in MOS or by "cheating" by formatting via Windows?

Quote:

In normal situations only quick format should be used. But if it doesnt work (fat, ntfs?) better try it in Windows...

@itix

I did try that. I use Win7 so I tried both FAT and NTFS (no other options). But neither did the trick for MOS. FAT was identified, but unusable in MOS and NTFS works fine but can not add files (as expected). And quick format doesn't work for either.

Can it be the fact that the HDD is 149 gig (larger than MOS can handle) that causes my problems?

It's not a MorphOS limitation. I formated about 650 gigs partition with quickformat under IceFS, but there sure is some problem under G5, as it's not possible to change partitions without complete destruction of everyhing on the harddrive.

Martin.

> 149 gig (larger than MOS can handle)

MorphOS can usually handle even larger HDDs without problem.

It's only certain filesystems which have limits for partition sizes, but even with them it isn't limiting the actual hd size. SFS has 128GB limit for partition size and PFS litlle smaller.

Anyway, I haven't had problems using 250GB, 500GB and 1TB external drives under MorphOS. Only tried with G3/G4 machines though.. 250GB one is even repartitioned & formatted to SFS..

[ Edited by jPV 13.08.2013 - 12:13 ]

Quote:

How come quick format doesn't work? I just tried it here on my G5 with some usb stick and it went just fine. You should check the USB preferences log - likely your device is generating a lot of NAK Timeouts, meaning the I/O operations fail. In that case tuning the device's settings like increasing startup delay should help.

Hello everyone, and thanks for the replies!

I did finally get format to work.

What I did was to go to HDToolbox and delete all partitions. Then I used FSFormat and formatted in a standard fashion (which formatted it in FAT32L) and it worked. When I tried ordinary format afterwards it worked too (also formatted in FAT32L).

Should I try to format it in a different format? If so, which format and with which program?