LaCie drive goes crazy on iMac but works on Windows

[Xaverius]

Hello,

I recently got myself a hard drive but because my father took it with him he used it for a while. When i got it back it was al f*cked up he offcourse needed to mess with it and made it partitioned...

So well no big deal, i plugged it in on windows, works fine. Tried on iMac, doesn't work... i said probably because it's partitioned. So i installed partition manager. Deleted the partitions. And made it back too 1. Made it NTFS and everything worked fine. But again when i plugged it in on my iMac it wouldn't work. It makes some crazy ticking sounds but it doesn't mount i cant even see it in disk management.

So well, i reformated in FAT32, same result.

I did everything what i could, bought disk warior or something but still it won't find it.

It works fine on windows, it doesn't on mac, i want too use it interchangeable between mac and windows

Any sugestions?

 

[msevild]

Sounds like it might not be getting enough power on the mac side, hence the ticking. Are you using a USB cable or a firewire cable to connect it to the machine? Only other reason it would be ticking is if the drive is starting to fail or has failed and maybe that's why it is not showing up on the mac. Hard to say.(and yes it can be failing and still show up on one machine and be partitioned and not another). But I don't think this might be the case for you. Let me know.

 

[angelwatt]

Did Google search for 'mac won't recognize external hard drive' and turned up these. Hopefully they are of help.

http://ask.metafilter.com/54448/My-external-hard-drive-is-suddenly-unreadable
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=69453 (no true solution, but may give you some ideas)

 

[Xaverius]

Alright i think i will go with the not enoufgh power option (i did not try too plug it in on my imac but actualy on the port on the keyboard). On my mates macbook pro it worked fine. He formated it journaled but now i cannot read it on my pc xD

So how should i let it be formated? So i can use it with both windows and pc, some say fat 32 but can macosx format lager then 32gb?

I connect it trough USB btw

 

[angelwatt]

Alright i think i will go with the not enoufgh power option (i did not try too plug it in on my imac but actualy on the port on the keyboard). On my mates macbook pro it worked fine. He formated it journaled but now i cannot read it on my pc xD

So how should i let it be formated? So i can use it with both windows and pc, some say fat 32 but can macosx format lager then 32gb?

I connect it trough USB btw

Yes, Mac can format larger than 32GB, I've done 1TB (FAT32 has the limit that individual files can't be more than 4GB). Windows needs either FAT or NTFS. Mac can read and write to FAT, but can only read NTFS unless you install some 3rd party apps. I'm not sure of a tool on Mac that lets you format a drive in NTFS so FAT is likely you're best bet if you're wanting to do the formatting from Mac.