Brand new HDD formatted to exFAT in Mac OSX Lion not recognized on Mac or PC

[KatherX]

Brand new 2.5TB Elements formatted to exFAT on Mac OSX Lion does not mount and is not recognized on Windows 7 64bit PC

I purchased a WD Elements 2.5TB HHD a few months ago and just now got around to configure it as a backup. Here's what steps I took so far to no avail:

 - Plugged the HD into my iMac running OSX Lion 10.7.3

 - Format disk in Disk Utilty as exFAT at 8:00pm Wed night.

 - Formatting was in progress and seemed to be taking forever. Estimated time remaining said 17hrs!

 - Went to bed and let the format run. The next morning at 7:00am, the formatting was still in progress!

 - Came home from work at 6:00pm Thurs and checked on disk to see that it finished formatting in 18.5hrs and had an error.

 - HD is no longer mounted and doesn't appear on desktop.

 - Brought the drive to work today (Fri) to see if I could reformat it on my Windows 7 PC.

 - The drive shows up in "Devices" but does not mount as a drive letter.

 - No idea how to reformat in Windows without it being recognized as a drive.

Some research I've done this morning makes me think that I should have never tried to format the disk as exFAT. I've also read that people had issues with their HD because WD supplied a USB cable that was too long (could this be why it took 18.5hrs?!).

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I hope I didn't just throw away $180 by waiting months to hookup this drive. Lesson learned on that front.

Cheers.

[Joe_S]

ExFat isn't that well known or used. Try a third party format tool and try formatting it from Windows. Sometimes it does make a difference which OS you format it on.

Joe