Mac OSX not "seeing" external.

[tjtamblyn]

I've had this problem a lot. I have a 500GB external hard drive. 1 time out of 10, it will load up quickly without a problem. 5 times out of 10, it will load up in about an hour. The other 4 times out of 10, my hard drive will not even appear to exist to my computer and it will completely ignore it in Disk Utility, Networks, and there is no icon in Finder or on the Desktop. A few weeks later I will try again, and it will work.
Basically, my ibook G4 will not see my hard drive. The hard drive is on, it works on my Windows Desktop just fine, but my mac can't see it.

Restarting my computer helps sometimes. Is there anything I can do to find the hard drive without restarting?

 

[spinnerlys]

What do you mean by "external" HDD?

Is it connect wirelessly via some kind of router, via the 10/100 Ethernet port, the Firewire 400 port or the USB 2.0 port?


Have you tried resetting the a PMU reset: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1431 ?

 

[tjtamblyn]

My hard drives connects to my laptop via USB 2.0.

 

[Aj2488]

I'm having a similar problem. My external worked perfectly and showed in the finder every time I plugged it in via USB 2.0. However today I Upgraded my Macbook Pro's internal hard drive and reinstalled Snow Leopard and now the external does not show up on my desktop or in finder. The drive's light is on and it spins but does not show. Of course all my files were backed up on that so it is kind of important. Any thoughts? --Spinnerlys, I actually brought this up in the thread I started earlier this week before I saw this one... sorry for being a pain.

 

[jlindley]

1. Does it show up in 'Disk Utility'?

2. What is the output from: ls -l /Volumes

 

[Aj2488]

Just got it working. Plugged it in, nothing showed, unplugged it for a minute to let it reset and it came up perfectly.