Comments on: Mac OS X disk utility – resource busy error

By: bg

bg — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 03:25:10 +0000

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.

By: Jen

Jen — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 22:05:23 +0000

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

By: Mike Burton

Mike Burton — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 21:46:08 +0000

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.

By: Christoph Peter

Christoph Peter — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 08:46:31 +0000

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

By: martin

martin — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 03:41:22 +0000

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

thanks!

By: Oliver

Oliver — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 13:39:35 +0000

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.