New external HD won't mount?

[dolphin842]

I just put together an external HD w/ the following specs:

-Seagate Barracuda 120 GB (new, so it's unformatted)
-Macally Firewire 400 enclosure
-OS X 10.3.6
-PowerBook 12" 1.33 GHz

The HD spins up properly when powered up. Yet when I hook up the firewire cable... nothing. Well, almost nothing. The system profiler recognizes a "Firewire HDD" sometimes. After ~10 minutes it shows up in Disk Utility as a 111.9 GB drive (which is correct... but the capacity is shown as if it were formatted already?). Nothing ever shows up or is mounted in the Finder. If I try to format or partition the drive, Disk Utility hangs!

To test the case, I hooked up my iPod to the daisy chain firewire port on the case and it mounted just fine... so I'm thinking something's amiss with the HD? I set the jumper to master as instructed... any ideas on what could be wrong?

 

[Norouzi]

The dasiy chain working might not be an indicator that the case is good. There might be something wrong with the IDE to Firewire interface that wouldn't effect the FW chain, but would effect the drive mounting or being seen. The best way to test the drive would be to take it out of the FW case and put it in a different Machine, shouldn't matter if it's a Mac or PC since you just want to test it. If you can, install it in another machine and see if it can be formated. If you can format it then it's probabily a bad FW case, it it won't format you can be pretty sure that the drive is bad.

 

[dolphin842]

Hmm, that's a good point. Unfortunately I don't have another system available to test it on

I have heard that 10.3.6 has some firewire problems? Perhaps I should update and try again?

 

[Norouzi]

Do you have a friend who would be willing to let you install the drive in their machine to test it. Really the best way to eliminate one or the other is to do that, or if you have, or know someone who has, an extra drive put that in the case and see if anything is different.