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Lost a potential switcher today...

Palad1

Palad1

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Feb 24, 2004
647
0
London, UK
Hi all,

Today is the very first day I am crossed with my rev.c 15'' PowerBook.

I was demoing a friend the whole shebang (osx/expose/terminal/iLife...) when he asked me about external hard drive support, so he just plugged his Western Digital USB2 hard drive in my pb and...

and the damn drive didn't mount!

Switched usp ports, then it mounted, I started copying a large file (1 gig) and lo and behold... after 400 megs the finder crashed on me, thrice, even after rebooting !

Damn you, WD USB2 external hard drive, damn you to hell!

edit: it was formatted as fat32 and mounts fine on several other PCs . Noooooes!!!1111oneoneone
 
Yes this s@©ks :(

Maybe this particular drive doesnt have proper drivers in OSX and needs drivers from CD that came with it?
 
If it helps my friend is switching today as his iMac arrives, thats the 5th mac sale I've convinced, I should get commission.
 
It's often necessary to update the firmware on the drive itself. Apple machines and newer incarnations of OS X tend to make use of the latest firmware, thereby causing incompatibility with older drives which ran perfectly on older machines (and thus with older firmware).

I had a similar problem when I got my iMac G5 and I plugged in an external Firewire HD that had run perfectly on my old iBook. For hours I got Finder crashes and issues with mounting. After updating the firmware, all was well.

You also have to be carfeful that you haven't overloaded the USB ports. Another Firewire example: If I try to use an iSight along with an external HD, I get Finder glitches and mounting problems too. Turns out there's too much of a drain on the power supplied by the Firewire hub.

Try updating the firmware/drivers for the Western Digital drive and see if you have better luck.
 
I have a three year old Western Digital USB2 external hard drive, and I've had no problems mounting it on my Core Duo iMac. I've formatted it to HFS+ now (since I don't need it for Windows any more), but when it was FAT32, it still worked fine.
 
WD USB hard drive issues

I bet that's the exact same WB USB 2.0 external drive I have over here. I bought a WD "Passport" drive when I had a Powerbook G4 17" 1.5Ghz notebook, and discovered it wouldn't usually work with it. I think I got it to mount to the desktop once or twice, but both times it did, it wasn't reading or writing data reliably. It worked just fine on my PowerMac G5 desktop, however.

But FYI, I upgraded to a MacBook Pro laptop now, and the drive does work fine with it. So one of the other people posting here was correct; it's an issue with insufficient power being supplied over the USB port on the Powerbook G4 systems.

It's much better to use a removeable drive with its own AC power adapter on the Powerbook G4s.


Palad1 said:
Hi all,

Today is the very first day I am crossed with my rev.c 15'' PowerBook.

I was demoing a friend the whole shebang (osx/expose/terminal/iLife...) when he asked me about external hard drive support, so he just plugged his Western Digital USB2 hard drive in my pb and...

and the damn drive didn't mount!

Switched usp ports, then it mounted, I started copying a large file (1 gig) and lo and behold... after 400 megs the finder crashed on me, thrice, even after rebooting !

Damn you, WD USB2 external hard drive, damn you to hell!

edit: it was formatted as fat32 and mounts fine on several other PCs . Noooooes!!!1111oneoneone
Click to expand...
 
kingtj said:
But FYI, I upgraded to a MacBook Pro laptop now, and the drive does work fine with it. So one of the other people posting here was correct; it's an issue with insufficient power being supplied over the USB port on the Powerbook G4 systems.
Click to expand...

Vindication! Thanks! :)
 
Thanks for the info,

I'll get him to buy one of those MacBook next Tuesday
images


:D
 
If you haven't really lost the switcher, you could take him along to an Apple store (assuming there's one nearby, are there any in Paris?) with the USB drive and try connecting it to one of the newer Macs.
 
Easier than a trip to an apple Store (there are none in France), I pointed him to MacRumors...

Time will tell :)
 
~Shard~ said:
If that's the only reason why your friend isn't switching then that's pretty bad. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...
I was thinking that.. Windows is worse because it crashes so much that it doesn't matter if the hard drive works..
 
Mammoth said:
I was thinking that.. Windows is worse because it crashes so much that it doesn't matter if the hard drive works..
Click to expand...

Easy, tiger. I haven't had a crash of XP in several years. I still don't like it, but go slow on the FUD :)
 
Mammoth said:
I was thinking that.. Windows is worse because it crashes so much that it doesn't matter if the hard drive works..
Click to expand...

Exactly. I think the guy is just looking for an excuse to slam the Mac platform if he complains about something like that. Ah well, whatever...
 
gauchogolfer said:
Easy, tiger. I haven't had a crash of XP in several years. I still don't like it, but go slow on the FUD :)
Click to expand...
I, however have much worse luck. Only Windows decides to lose it's connection to my router spontaneously.
 
gauchogolfer said:
Easy, tiger. I haven't had a crash of XP in several years. I still don't like it, but go slow on the FUD :)
Click to expand...
Well, did you know that the default XP behaviour now on a system crash is to restart? That's why people no longer report so many BSODs with XP.

People remember a BSOD better than a system restart because they are faced with a big blue screen that doesn't go away, while they may blame a restart on a momentary power interruption and forget about it.

Having said that, I don't remember a restart with any of my PCs since I started using XP, but then, I didn't know about this until recently so maybe I just forgot about any restarts.
 
One thought--FAT32 might not be supported by OSX. I read something recently on here that said it wasn't because of the block sizes or something, though I could be wrong (and have no reason to find out, since I have one windows machine and it is NTFS)...
 
disconap said:
One thought--FAT32 might not be supported by OSX. I read something recently on here that said it wasn't because of the block sizes or something, though I could be wrong (and have no reason to find out, since I have one windows machine and it is NTFS)...
Click to expand...

FAT32 is well supported by OS X. NTFS on the other hand officially only has read support, although I've heard that there is some kind of experimental write support in recent versions of OS X.
 
FAT32 works fine in OS X.
NTFS is read only. The write ability is virtually non-existantto the point of being pointless.
 
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