External hard drive enclosure not recognised.

[davidoloan]

I bought a IT-CEO 3.5" Sata external hard drive enclosure.

It has its own power supply and USB 3.0.

The HD is a Samsung HD103SJ, 1TB, 7200rpm.

A new iMac and a 2013 MacBook Air won't recognise it at all.

The hard drive was formatted in Windows and has an iTunes music library I want to transfer.

The enclosure appears ok in a Linux computer.

The hard drive works perfectly when plugged directly into the second slot inside the Linux computer.

I can get Western Digital external drives formatted in Windows to appear in the two Apple computers without any trouble but not this enclosure.

Am I doing something wrong?

 

[RMo]

I've had a USB 3.0 enclosure work fine on my Windows box but not on my Mac, but it worked fine once I replaced the stock USB 3.0 cable that came with the enclosure. In my case, I think the cable was bad, so, while unlikely, maybe that is also what's happening for you.

As an interim measure (because I had no extra USB 3.0 cables) and as a test, I tried it with a USB 2.0 cable, and it worked fine. Perhaps you could see if that does anything for you. You don't have to keep it that way, but, like I said, it could be useful for testing to narrow down the possibilities.

My first thought was that it might be some sort of file system incompatibility, but I can't think of any filesystem modern versions of Windows will let you use that OS X can't at least read (unlike when you go from OS X to Windows), and it sounds like you've done this successfully before.

 

[davidoloan]

Thanks, I will go and try a USB 2.0 cable.

The USB 3.0 cable is working perfectly on a Linux computer, and so has the USB 2.0 cable I have just tried.

 

[davidoloan]

USB 2.0 didn't work either.

It is definitely something to do with the Apple computers.

It's just not working.