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Homemade external drive question

G

GetGo

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jan 2, 2004
147
0
New Jersey
I bought a 2.5 laptop internal drive, and an enclosure for it. The enclosure only has USB 2.0. I had a guy at work format it in Fat32 so I could use it with my iBook and my PC.

Well when is is said and done the external HD is seen by my PC but not by the iBook. I bought this thing for the iBook.

Can anyone tell me what I am doing wrong. The drive is spinning when I connect the external to the ibook, but I don't see a drive show up on my desktop. The enclosure has two USB 2.0 plugs that I plug in at the same time.

Help please.
 
You plug in BOTH the USB 2 plugs at once? You mean, like one to the PC and one to the Mac? That's probably your problem. I'm pretty sure you can only connect it to one at a time. The second USB port is for daisy chaining, so you can connect another device to the same computer.

Failing that, do you have the latest version of OS X installed, 10.3.8? I think there were recently some additions to OS X's disk drivers and the drive may not work unless you install the latest update.

Finally, try opening Disk Utility (in the Utilities folder if you don't know) and see if the drive even shows up. If it doesn't even show up then the computer doesn't recognize that it's connected. If it does show up, then you may need to format the drive using the Mac in order to use it.
 
I am not plugging in the USB to a Mac and PC. The drive has a cable with 2 USB connectors, the additional one is for extra power to the drive. I plug them both into the ibook. I have checked the disk utility and the drive does not show up. I did get a mimi cd with the drive with drivers I believe. Could this be the problem that OS X doesn't have the right drivers?
 
You sure you connected everything correctly in the drive enclosure? the cables are all snug, and the jumpers are correct? Just because the drive spins up doesn't mean the ide is in all the way.
 
It may be that the Drive isn't getting enough power from the port...

If that is so... try plugging in the main on to the iBook and the other one to say a desktop where it has enough power for sure. The drive would spin... but not enough for it to be recognized.

Try that out.

I had this problem with my older 1Ghz Al Powerbook and my 2.5 Portable Hard Drive. I didn't have any problems on my 1.33Ghz Al Powerbook ...
 
I am very disappointed in this forum. I usually get some very good feed back from you guys. I was asking about my external HD that wasn't working with the USB 2.o iBook.

Well I told my story to my 22 year old nephew the other day, and he said why don't you try a firewire enclosure. He said Macs like firewire more than USB 2.0.

So I ordered a firewire enclosure for $30.00 and it works, the Mac sees the drive and my PC sees the drive. I really thought one of you guys would know that.
 
It's reasonably difficult to guess that you bought an incompatible enclosure and should go out and buy a new one. Sorry for not being helpful but we sort of assumed that when you said you bought the original enclosure you would have checked on the box or something to see if it's work with a Mac.

Still, we'll try to be more helpful next time. :)
 
mad jew, I did check the enclosure and it said you could use it with Mac or PC and it did not. I know people can't see the item I bought, but one guy answered with a type of joke reply which I didn't like.
 
The USB 2.0 connection should have worked, but many times the port does not put out enough power to run it under bus power -- so you're stuck with a power brick.

You can usually see this under System Profiler, the OS will shut off a port when it thinks it's drawing too much -- which may be because the USB device is reporting the wrong info.
 
GetGo said:
mad jew, I did check the enclosure and it said you could use it with Mac or PC and it did not. I know people can't see the item I bought, but one guy answered with a type of joke reply which I didn't like.
Click to expand...

Fair enough. I hope you took it back to wherever you bought it from then.
 
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