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Question about WD Passport drive...

M

moworks2

macrumors member
Original poster
May 3, 2007
83
3
I bought a 160gb passport drive...attached it to my g4 tower and formatted it fine, but when I hook it up to my ibook, a g3 700mhz dual usb model, it doesn't pop up on the desk top, it just makes a clicking sound...

what to do, what to do?...any ideas...

thanks

M
 
It's possible that the USB ports on an iBook that old simply aren't providing enough power to initialize and spin up the disc properly. That'd be my guess.
 
I agree. I have a USB external drive that needs one of those double-USB cords for power. When I try a single cable, it sounds just like you describe.

Do you have a powered USB hub you can try? That might give you enough of a power boost to get it going on your iBook...

This is one of the reasons I like Firewire Drives over USB...
 
aross99 said:
I agree. I have a USB external drive that needs one of those double-USB cords for power. When I try a single cable, it sounds just like you describe.


Do you have a powered USB hub you can try? That might give you enough of a power boost to get it going on your iBook...


This is one of the reasons I like Firewire Drives over USB...
Click to expand...

ok, ok, what is a double USB cord?...not sure i've ever seen one of those...

I did at first try a powered hub but it didn't work on that...so far it only works when directly plugged into the usb port on the back of my eight year old g4 tower...

thanks

M
 
You may need this:

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/accessories.asp?ProdID=170

My partner bought a WD Passport and returned it within a week because of what you described. On one computer it would work fine. On another it wouldn't appear on the desktop. A little investigation at the WD site brought up the fact that some USB ports don't give enough juice so you need to basically get a cable to connect it to two USB ports (see above link), which is impossible on some Powerbooks that don't have 2 USB ports next to each other.

To agree with another poster, that's why I don't use USB drives and only use Firewire (love my G-Tech mini drive)
 
treehorn said:
You may need this:

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/accessories.asp?ProdID=170

My partner bought a WD Passport and returned it within a week because of what you described. On one computer it would work fine. On another it wouldn't appear on the desktop. A little investigation at the WD site brought up the fact that some USB ports don't give enough juice so you need to basically get a cable to connect it to two USB ports (see above link), which is impossible on some Powerbooks that don't have 2 USB ports next to each other.

To agree with another poster, that's why I don't use USB drives and only use Firewire (love my G-Tech mini drive)
Click to expand...

thanks for the link treehorn...I'll need to buy one of those...I got the drive to show up on my ibook this morning by plugging it into the powered hub i have connected to it...kinda of surprised me because the drive doesn't work on the powered hub i have connected to my g4 tower...and they're the same...

i need the usb connection for a hard drive connected to our television, something our isp gave us...it only takes usb...kinda weird to pick such a slow connection to download video but there you go...the drive only clicks when plugged into that and i'm hoping it'll work with the double connection...

thanks for your help...
 
I have a WD Passport which I plug into an Asus eePC and is recognised without any issues. Plugging it into a PowerBook G4 via a USB splitter (so as to provide more power, it's plugged into both the laptop's USB ports) the device fails to boot up and be recognised by the PowerBook.

Any ideas how to fix this?
 
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