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[Bambleweeny57]

Hi
I'm experiencing problems formatting two New Seagate 2TB drives (ST32000542AS).
I've seen user reports that these drives are compatible but not official.
Note: the unit had two 1TB WD10EACS drives in previously, so the DNS hardware works fine.

When trying to set up as JBOD, the Format Process seems to immediately jump to "Initializing 8%"
and then gets stuck there, forever.
When putting either single drive in, a standard format similarly jumps to 14% and stops.
The DNS is just giving me no idea what's wrong. No error messages, No progress, Nothing!
The Drive LED just stays solid, showing no "flashing" activity.

The drives are recognized and pass SMART on the DNS.
They have also passed all external tests and work fine in a Windows PC.

Is there anything I can do to prep the drives externally?
Could I possibly even format smaller drives, clone those onto the 2TB's and extend their partitions with some partitioning tool?

I'm basically stumped!
Any ideas from someone with experience with these drives or other format problem fixes, would be much appreciated!
Cheers

Note: I've tried both the 2.02 and the 2.03 Beta F/W. No Difference

[Bambleweeny57]

I DID IT!!!

For The Record, to help other poor sods seeing the same thing,...

MY problem was that these two drives were formatted with something called the
"GPT Protective Partition". (they came from another Linux Based box).
I was able to see this by sticking them in my PC and opening the Disk Management Utility,...
although it wasn't quite that simple because this partition type actually prevented my PC BIOS
from booting past the IDE detection stage. (Your BIOS may give you better results)
I had to boot the PC and then HOT PLUG the drives in!  

So now, how to remove this partition,... That's even more fun!
Windows Disk Management cannot touch this partition type.
One solution is to open a DOS command window and run the command DiskPart.
Then type the following:
"list disk" (to get the ID # of the drives)
"select disk #" (Where # is the numeric ID of the drive you want to erase - BE CAREFUL!)
"clean"

Alternatively, you can boot from Live Linux O/S's "Parted Magic" or "Gparted" (from CD/USB).
These O/S's will allow you to erase the GPT partition.

Once the drives were TRULY empty of this damn GPT partition table
I put them back in the DNS320 and the formatting went smoothly.

BASICALLY,
just like this GPT formatting was confusing my PC Bios preventing it from booting,
I guess it was also confusing the DNS-320 Linux firmware.

Hope this helps someone