Apple's OS X Leopard certainly is getting its share of serious bugs (like the file-deleting bug), and this time, it's still no different. Jeremy Horwitz from iLounge needed to format a USB hard disk using the Disk Utility when he discovered that no, the Disk Utility in his Mac just wouldn't get the job done.

So what exactly happened? When Horwitz tried to clear a 500GB G-Drive with the Disk Utility program the application promptly froze up, with the progress bar getting stuck and eventually disappearing after a long while. Thinking that the problem lay with the USB drive, Horwitz contacted the customer service department of its manufacturer, G-Drive.

To make things short, the solution that G-Tech offered were either to find an older version of OS X (pre 10.4.6), or use a PC with MacDrive installed to format the USB drive. Looks like the problem lay with the Mac OS, and not with the USB drive itself.

There's also another way: if you have a Mac OS X 10.4 installer handy, just insert it into your computer's disc drive and let it load while holding down the C key. Then run Disk Utility from the DVD. It's quite a cumbersome process to go through for such a simple task, but all we can do is cope. Will Apple eventually issue a fix for this nasty bug?

Picture courtesy of iLounge.