Issue: You have an external USB disk that you want to use on your Mac but disk utility complains that the "Disk Erase Failed" and no matter what you do the drive won't erase.
Solution: Thanks to Rick Mead who replied to a thread on the Apple Discussion forums, you should be able to get the disk partitioned and erased properly.
• Plug the drive in
• Open Disk Utility and select the drive (not the partition)
• On the left side of the screen you will will see "First Aid, Erase, Partition, RAID & Restore"
• Click Partition
• Under Volume Scheme select the drop down box and select 1 partition (assuming you only want the computer to see the drive as one large drive).
• Click "Options..." below the white box and change the selection from "Master Boot Record" to "GUID Partition Table".
• Click Apply and you will be done.
This is the process for formatting ANY Hard Drive that comes as a windows NTFS system. The reason it would error on you is because you were trying to change the format of the partition while leaving the drive as a Windows drive.
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*UPDATE* I ran into this again and it turned out that I needed to plug the USB disk directly into the iMac instead of through a USB hub to get it to format. When I was finished I had a 2 TB USB disk partitioned with two partitions. One for Windows 7 and the other for Time Machine.
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