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I have a WD Elements external hard disk. Earlier it was using NTFS file system, which I have formatted to DOS_FAT_32. Now I can't see the hard disk in finder or disk utility.

But when I execute the command diskutil list, the the external HD is listed:

/dev/disk2 (external, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk2
   1:                 DOS_FAT_32 JAY3                    1.0 TB     disk2s1

How do I make the hard disk detect in finder window and be able to store and retrieve files from it?

jay
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1 Answers1

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If you are absolutely sure it is /dev/disk2 and you have no data on it that you want, you can overwrite the initial few sectors of the disk with zeroes so that it looks completely uninitialised like this:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdisk2 bs=65536 count=1000

Yes, I did mean to add the extra r in front of disk2 and no, nobody should copy and paste this command because it will obliterate disk2 !!!.

Then unplug and replug the disk and go into Disk Utility, select the blank disk and click Erase at the top of the Disk Utility window and you will be able to format it.

Mark Setchell
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