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Mac OS X disk utility – resource busy error

WD mybook 500GB pro edition

WD mybook 500GB pro edition

I noticed that time machine kept preparing for a backup on my western digital mybook 500GB pro edition external harddrive that is connected to an Apple Airport extreme basestation. At first I thought it was a time machine problem but soon I realized that my external harddrive was the source of the problem.

Sympthoms:

  • the disk is not mountable
  • the disk does not show up in finder
  • the airport utility can not access the base station as long as the disk is connected
  • the disk does show up in the disk utility

After screwing with it for a bit I decided to wipe the entire drive in order to fix the problem. Both erasing and repartitioning the disk resulted in an error message saying “resource is busy”.

What did not help:

  • restarting the disk
  • restarting the computer
  • booting from the os x disc and using the disc utility from there will not help either

So I was ready to give up and looked up the warranty information on the western digital website – which is really really good by the way. They had a small windows diagnosis tool for download one should try befor applying for a replacement. So I booted up in windows XP ran the diagnose and it toled me everything was perfectly fine.

The solution to the problem:

just use the standard built in windows XP disk management and wipe the old apple partition and replace it with a new windows NTFS partion( just for now). After this step windows should already be able to see and use the disc under my computer. Now simply reboot to OS X and launch the disk utility, reformat the disk to apples file system and reconnect it the base station.

Note:

Unfortunatly this solution results in complete loss of all your data that was on the drive. But I found no better way.

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 3rd, 2008 at 15:06 and is filed under Tech Questions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  1. Oliver October 27, 2008 at 14:39

    I tried the reformatting as NTFS drive under XP (took a while and had no errors, so the drive is 100% ok) and I still get the resource busy bug with Disk Utility afterwards. ARGGGG… I also strongly believe that TimeMaschine killed the harddrive, I lost 3 drives in a row in a few days, all where used by TimeMaschine. I am not sure, but I think it’s possible that the last Aperture Update interacted here, after that the problem started.

  2. martin November 1, 2008 at 04:41

    This also works for iPods with the dreaded ‘Resource busy (16)’ error

    thanks!

  3. Christoph Peter November 1, 2008 at 09:46

    @Oliver
    have you tried reformatting the drive back to apples file format? That did the trick for me.

  4. Mike Burton June 15, 2009 at 22:46

    I had a similar problem, Disk Utility could see my USB DRIVE but not the partition within it. When I tried to erase the drive I got “resource busy” error. Solution was to press Security Options & choose “zero out data” before pressing “Erase”. Once this had started working (hear disc activity) I pressed Skip so as not to wait whole 7 hours, then all was fine.

  5. Jen July 12, 2009 at 23:05

    I tried the Disk Utility Erase solution and still got the Resource Busy error. Any suggestions for someone that isn’t running Windows?

  6. bg August 25, 2009 at 04:25

    Wow, I have the same problem with my 500GB mybook. For some reason, OSX Disk Utility thinks the disk is 2TB. I can’t revive it.