Time Machine Freezes During Initial Backup

Question

I have a 500gb external Western Digital HDD I am trying to use as my Time Machine backup drive. The computer I'm using is a 24" iMac with about 250gb of data on it. The external drive is partitioned as a GUID / Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
When I try to run the initial backup, it will randomly freeze during the process. Sometimes it gets halfway through the backup and freezes, other times, right away. Sometimes there is an error, other times there isn't.
I have tried re-partitioning the drive many times, manually starting the backup and also letting the backup start on its own. All of my applications are closed when the backup begins, but no matter what I do, I cannot get the initial backup process to complete.
Ironically, I had the same problem on ANOTHER iMac of mine, with the same model Western Digital drive. The backup would freeze randomly during the initial process but I would keep manually re-starting the backup until it magically finished the backup. Now that computer seems to be working fine.
However, I still can't get this other iMac to work. I find it strange that two separate computers with two separate 500gb Western Digital drives would have the same problem with Time Machine, unless the problem is with Time Machine itself.
Any ideas out there how to resolve this?

Answer 1

Bruno321 wrote:
However, I still can't get this other iMac to work. I find it strange that two separate computers with two separate 500gb Western Digital drives would have the same problem with Time Machine, unless the problem is with Time Machine itself.
Why do you assume it's TM, not WD?
There are many possibilities.
Did you completely erase the drive before formatting it? Sometimes the utilities, etc., that come on new drives can interfere with TM.
Is your iMac an Intel? If it's an older PPC, you need the Apple Partition Map, not GUID.
Is this USB or FireWire? USB is often much slower and less reliable.
If it's USB, does it have it's own power, or does it draw from your Mac? Often there's just barely enough to run a drive; if you have another USB peripheral, it can take enough power to interfere with the disk.
Does it have an automatic "spin down" feature? If so, can you disable it?
Does it have the latest updates? I thing I saw a post here recently that a WD update fixed, but I can't find it now.
Are you running any anti-virus scanning? If so, exclude your TM drive from it.
Sometimes excluding it from Spotlight as well, at least during a large initial backup, can prevent conflicts between TM and Spotlight.