# How long to partition drive?



## EventVwr (Jan 13, 2010)

I have a 500 GB drive that I had been using on a Windows computer. I'm currently waiting for MAC to partition this drive. In the last 1 1/2 hours the blue "creating partition map" progress bar has hardly moved. I don't know. May it has stopped. It still has that "watery" look like it's working. How long should it take to partition a drive?

1 partition
MAC OS Extended (Journaled)


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## MartyF81 (Jan 23, 2013)

Less than a minute is about as long as it should take to do it.


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## EventVwr (Jan 13, 2010)

That's what I thought. I decided to zero wipe it. Then I'll try again to partition.


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## Mighty_Miro_WD (Sep 15, 2014)

Hi @EventVwr!

I agree with @MartyF81 - it shouldn't take more than few minutes to partition a 500GB drive. So I'd suggest what you've already started dong - write zeroes on the hard disk and then try to partition and format it.

Hopefully it will work, but in case it doesn't then there could be something wrong happening with the HDD so I'd suggest to run a diagnostic test, for instance "Verify Disk" via Disk Utility, and see if anything wrong will be detected.

Hope this helps and let us know how it went.


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## EventVwr (Jan 13, 2010)

I grabbed another (older) drive, used Data Lifeguard to zero wipe the start and end of it on my Windows computer, then partitioned it on my MAC and that took seconds. It was a newer drive that was causing the problems. Maybe that had something to do with it. Maybe I needed to stick a jumper on there.


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## spunk.funk (May 13, 2010)

SATA drives do not require a Jumper.


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