External hfsplus formatted usb Lacie drive freezes/locs up iMac

[macfollower]

I have had a Lacie USB (500Gb) external usb drive for a while. Besides being a very loud drive it's been working up until recently. Its rendered useless when connected to my intel iMac with Leopard because it locks up OS X so bad that I have to physically power it down and restart it.

I mostly use Linux but I do admit to loving my wifes mac and use it very often at home. I really thought that it was a corrupted filesystem or hardware issue with the drive but when I connect it to my Suse (11.0) system it mounts it. It appears to be read only but I'm thinking that the ownership and permissions are causing that and will not change that because I would like to resolve the issue so I can move it back to the Mac.

 

[merl1n]

I have had a Lacie USB (500Gb) external usb drive for a while. Besides being a very loud drive it's been working up until recently. Its rendered useless when connected to my intel iMac with Leopard because it locks up OS X so bad that I have to physically power it down and restart it.

I mostly use Linux but I do admit to loving my wifes mac and use it very often at home. I really thought that it was a corrupted filesystem or hardware issue with the drive but when I connect it to my Suse (11.0) system it mounts it. It appears to be read only but I'm thinking that the ownership and permissions are causing that and will not change that because I would like to resolve the issue so I can move it back to the Mac.

Most 3rd party drives come pre-formatted for Windows Partition Maps ("Master Boot Record". This may be the problem. What you should do is move all of your files off of this drive to your Linux system. Reformat the drive on the linux box and then connect it to your mac. I don't use Linux so I am guessing here. Try to format the disk as MSDOS FAT32 if this is possible.

If it still hoses MacOS, then you better call LaCie and get a replacement. If you are ok so far, proceed...

Use Disk Utility to reformat the drive thusly:

1. Select your drive device name (not the volume below it) and click the Partition tab.
2. In the Partition tab, change "Current" to "1 Partition" (or as many as you want). This enables the Options button.
3. Click the Options button and select "GUID Partition Mapping". Click OK
4. Now name each partition by first selecting it. Set the format type for each partition (ie, MacOS extended-journaled, MSDOS-FAT32, etc).
5. Click Apply.

Now you can use scp to copy the files from your linux box back to your drive thru your network.