MacOS – Disk utility on OSX and gParted both fail to format a drive

mac-minimacos

I have mac mini mid 2011, bought 14 months back. Yesterday I started my system normally but it was running slow the usual so I restarted it, after restarting system was taking too long to boot but this time it did not show the login screen and stop sign or crossed circle appeared in place of apple logo.

I again restated the system and keep holding option key to use disk utility and recovery-hd(actual name in my sys is recovery-10.8.2) but recovery also didnt worked, after selecting recovey-hd same happen system keep booting too long and stop sign appear on apple logo.

I have bootable mountain lion usb, I get into disk utility check the hard drive by running verify disk and got no issues.

I have 3 partitions

  • Macintosh HD (os installed in this) 200gb
  • Macintosh HD 2 (I keep my important files in this) 200gb
  • My TimeMachine (I use this for time machine backup) 100gb

I decide to format Macintosh HD and to install mountain Lion again so I started to format this partition, but again after approx 25% formatting got stuck, after restart I also delete the partition and then tried to format but formatting got stuck in middle. I restarted the system and read searched on Internet regarding this issue, some saying hard drive crashed, same saying fan not working but both are fine in my case.

I created a bootable ubuntu on another usb and boot the system from ubuntu, then I tried to delete and format partition using gParted Partition Editor but after too long operation failed message appeared (now I am worried).

I keep searching on Internet regarding this issue and found that this happens when Master Boot Record gets corrupt. And thats why nothing can be write on disk(brief description).

Please help me what actually happed and how to fix this issue?

Best Answer

Two possible problems IMHO:

1) Faulty disk, bad blocks on it.
2) Corrupted GUID (usually mac disks aren't formatted with MBR)

Possible check/solutions:

1) How to check for bad blocks without formatting.
2) View my answer here.

However, if you can provide an exit error number while trying to format disk with disk utility it's easier to identify the exact origin of your issue.

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