Couple of external HD questions

[erummel]

A few months ago I bought a WD MyBook 500GB external HD. I'm very happy with it, and have no issues with the HD itself; its performance has been flawless.

The first problem I have is when I put the MBP in clamshell mode to use my external mouse/kb/display it drop the connection to the external HD (it is connected via FW800). Everything else works fine, but no connection to the external drive. The icon just disappears. I have to play what seems a rather random game of unplugging FW and power cables in different orders for 5-10 min before it finds the drive. Is there a better way to do this? It seems so random and it's a real pain in the arse. And I don't want to damage any data.

Second question. I'm building a cheap gaming rig and way curious if I can plug the external into the win box (say via FW400 or USB) and have it read/writable by both the mac and windows box at the same time. The drive is formatted FAT32.

Third, I keep my iTunes library on the external. Can I point a win copy of iTunes at the directory and share the library. Will the win box (vista home prem 64) play nice with my iTunes lib or jack it up? Do I need to import it onto the windows box?

Any help would be much appreciated.

 

[erummel]

no one has any ideas?

 

[merl1n]

A few months ago I bought a WD MyBook 500GB external HD. I'm very happy with it, and have no issues with the HD itself; its performance has been flawless.

The first problem I have is when I put the MBP in clamshell mode to use my external mouse/kb/display it drop the connection to the external HD (it is connected via FW800). Everything else works fine, but no connection to the external drive. The icon just disappears. I have to play what seems a rather random game of unplugging FW and power cables in different orders for 5-10 min before it finds the drive. Is there a better way to do this? It seems so random and it's a real pain in the arse. And I don't want to damage any data.

Second question. I'm building a cheap gaming rig and way curious if I can plug the external into the win box (say via FW400 or USB) and have it read/writable by both the mac and windows box at the same time. The drive is formatted FAT32.

Third, I keep my iTunes library on the external. Can I point a win copy of iTunes at the directory and share the library. Will the win box (vista home prem 64) play nice with my iTunes lib or jack it up? Do I need to import it onto the windows box?

Any help would be much appreciated.

I can only help you with the first item...

I use basically the same setup. If you are using an External display/keyboard/mouse, hit the power button on your mac at initial startup and immediately close it. You should still hear the bong and your external display should light up and boot normally.

It sounds like you are booting the mac with the display attached and after the boot completes, you are closing the mac. When you close the mac with the OS running, it goes into a sleep mode and is probably putting your drive to sleep as well. When you click the keyboard to wake it up the mac, the drive itself is not waking up.