Mac OS X disk utility – resource busy error
Friday, October 3rd, 2008
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.