Portable HDD not connecting

[Sirty Juan]

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I've got a 20Gb laptop harddrive in an enclosure and it won't connect to my G4 quicksilver. I think it may be because the G4 only has USB 1. However, on PCs I've never had a problem with it connecting to USB1 before. The Mac either doesn't recognise that anything is attached or a warning box comes up saying that it is unsafe or something. The harddrive is formated as FAT32.

My questions are:
Is it the formatting of the harddrive that is causing the problem or is it the Mac?
Will upgrading to USB 2.0 PCI card solve this problem? I did try a PCI card, but it didn't work, so i returned it - what brands are Mac compatible? Who has fitted a PCI USB2.0 card to their Mac?

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help me out!


PS. I did try a search, but when you put in 'hard drive' you get all sorts of other stuff and these drives are called portable, external, removable... so difficult to search for. Sorry!

 

[mad jew]

It's probably not getting enough power. Did the enclosure come with a power adaptor? It's definitely not the formatting because Macs work just fine with FAT32. As for the USB2 card, visit your local Apple reseller for advice. They'll probably be able to sell you an appropriate card.

 

[Nym]

I've had a similar problem. I had a HD connected and OS X recognized it and etc, but when I tryed to backup anything the file transfer would just halt randomly and the only way to get Finder to respond again was to turn of the switch in the enclosure. I never could solve this, I created 2 threads here but no one have me an answer