Manually mounting FW 800 drive in Mac OS 10.2.6

[spinnerlys]

Hello.

I currently work with an old G4 Power Mac (1.25 GHz, 2GB RAM) and have to mount a FW 800 volume (WD MyBook Studio Edition 1TB) to that computer so I can consolidate to it (Avid speak for copying some data).

But it doesn't mount, and Disk Utility only shows it greyed out, and there is no option to mount it like in 10.3 and following.

Is there anyway that I could mount it otherwise?

The strange thing is, there are already two WD MyBooks Studio Edition drives connected and fully mounted. But even if I disconnect all extra drives, the one WD MyBook is still greyed out, even after reboot, which helped sometimes.

PS: I also use this drive with a 10.4.11 PowerMac G5 and a 10.5.6 C2D MBP (Unibody). Can newer Mac OS versions leave some kind of mark, so that this older Mac OS won't allow it into its system?

Thanks for any help.

 

[whereisgraeme]

Try connecting the drive 'Daisy-Chain' through one of the WD drives that the OS recognizes. You will want to shut the drive down (even unplug it), start the drive up, then plug it into the back of one of the other active drives.

Another trouble-shooting step is to shut down the drive, disconnect the FW cable from the computer, reboot the computer - while this is happening cold-restart the drive (but don't connect it). Once the drive and the OS have both 'spun-up' (the WD drive may actually 'go-to-sleep' - but it should be 'on'), plug the FW cable into the port - it should cause the drive to spin-up and the OS should see it.

You can also down-pin to FW400

 

[whereisgraeme]

Also - the 'grey' image that you see is likely an indication that the drive was mounted... force Disk Utility to update mounted volumes to verify.

good-luck!