external hard drive not recognized

Was the friends Mac an Intel Mac?

Jofran said:

Hi, I'm hoping that I'm posting in the right place here. I've just bought my sister an external hard drive for her g4 imac. Its a 400g WD hard drive, I formatted it using a friend's mac and it worked fine, but her machine wont recognize it. Its not showing up in disk utility. She's running OS X and the hard drive has its own power supply.

I really don't know enough about macs to be able to sort it. If anyone knows what I'm doing wrong it would be a great help. Thanks.

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Check your cable connection (I assume you are using firewire) from the Mac to the drive. Unplug it an replug it in and listen to see if the drive is actually spinning up. If the drive has a USB connection, I would try that as well, but don't plug both the firewire and USB cables in at the same time.

Jofran said:

Hey, yeah the drive is spinning up fine. She's using usb. Tried disconnecting and reconnecting to no effect :/

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Did you try another cable?

You may want to do the following. You may have a corrupted PRAM or hardware cache file:

Reset PRAM - which will clear the PRAM code and write a fresh one.
Safe Boot - which will clear the hardware cache (and other cache files) file and generate a new one.

Go to apple.com/support and search for the instructions on how to do both.

Basic troubleshooting (before someone has you going too over the top). This applies to any PC, regardless.

1. Make sure that other USB devices can be seen out of that port,
2. Try switching ports,
3. Try a different cable,
4. And make sure that you are connecting directly to the Mac, and not a dry hub or a port on a keyboard.

In other words, isolate and eliminate.

jmacatac2002 said:

I know this is unrelated but it seems I'm not getting a response within my thread about my external hard drive, MAC ISSUES!!! so hopefully you guys can help. .

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Please do not hijack threads.

Jofran said:

Hi
Yeah that usb port works and its not a hub or a port on a keyboard.
I think the cable works because i just borrowed someone's mac laptop to try the hard drive with and it can recognize it fine :\

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When you connect the drive, can you see it attached in the System Profiler?

Jofran said:

No, its not showing up in the system profiler :\

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Well then, the drive is not communicating with the mac. Try another (new) USB cable. You may have some wear-and-tear on your USB ports and the cable you are using is not making proper contact or the cable itself has wear-and-tear. When you plug in the cable, make sure you feel it "snap (click) in" to ensure a proper connection. Once in, it should not wiggle or have any loose play.

merl1n said:

Well then, the drive is not communicating with the mac. Try another (new) USB cable. You may have some wear-and-tear on your USB ports and the cable you are using is not making proper contact or the cable itself has wear-and-tear. When you plug in the cable, make sure you feel it "snap (click) in" to ensure a proper connection. Once in, it should not wiggle or have any loose play.

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Also, if you haven't done this on her g4 imac, reset the PMU if the above doesn't work. See this article:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=95165

I'm having this exact problem with my Mac Mini and a 1TB WD MyBook Mac Edition USB drive. It worked fine for a couple days, now I can't get it to be recognized on my Mini. Doesn't appear in System Profiler. I can connect the drive to my MBP and it mounts fine. Has anyone else experienced this? Its a 1.66 CoreDuo Mini.

Solved my WD Hard drive not recognized by Mac issue

I am using a Powerbook G4 (ancient, yes I know) and a friend brought his WD hard drive over last night and I tried to connect using the USB, but no luck. The light of the HD came on, but it made this weird clicking noise. He told me he didn't have any issues at home on his PC and his bf used it on an Intel Mac, so I was confused. I tried resetting all sorts of stuff, but knew it wasn't my computer, cuz I picked up my multiple IOmega HD's just fine. Hell, I even tried to connect his HD directly to my 1TB IOmega, but nothing.

I decided that it wasn't getting enough juice from my laptop, kinda like a car missing some spark. I have an powered external Belkin USB Hub so connected that and voila!, it worked. The clicking noise stopped and I read the HD just fine.

This may not work for everyone, but it worked for me and figured I'd share this with you.

Hope this works for you. FYI, I'll never get a WD personally.

Merry Christmas, Happy holidays or however you swing!

J.