Smc

[dazzer21]

I Have two iMac 8,1 machines. One runs 10.5.8 Leopard, the other runs 10.6.8 Snow Leopard. Until recently the Snow Leopard one was located in another office and since transferring it to its new location, it refuses to acknowledge an external LaCie Slim USB DVD drive which had worked perfectly well up to this point. The Leopard machine recognises it so it's not the drive or the cable that is the issue. I also have a Firewire 400 Hard Drive which, when plugged in to the 10.6 machine, states it's unreadable and needs to be formatted. I tried formatting it and then re-plugging it in and the same message appears. Again, on the 10.5 iMac, no problems. Could this be anything to do with the machine requiring an SMC reset? I only heard about this not long ago and I'm wary of doing it as I have no idea what it actually resets - I don't want to render a work machine to have the need for installs/re-installs/re-configuring only to find that a fix didn't work. I've downloaded the latest drivers for each item and that hasn't caused any difference so, if an SMC reset isn't the way forward... any ideas? Thanks.