Vanishing External Hard Drive

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(I am hoping that I posted this in the right forum)

I am hoping someone can help me. I have a vanishing Western Digital Passport. (USB)It has vanished off my desktop and is not in my finder either. I can see it in my Disk Utility but it is grayed out. We have attached it to my BF’S PC and it show up no problem. It will not mount on the MAC. It will flick from showing to not showing in Disk Utility. What I have tried is:

Rebooting
I Checked that “Show All External Drives” is checked.
Relaunched My finder
Tried to repair / restore but would not let.

The one other time that this happened we had to wipe it clean and reinstall. But I do not want to do that (It kinda defeats the purpose.). I want to find out why it is doing this. It seems to vanish after I do a system upgrade. I have heard with the USB contentions sometimes there is not enough power and if you get a Y cable it helps. But that seems to refer to the laptops.

The specs on my system are:
IMAC Power PC G5 1.8GHz
MAC OSX 10.5.6 Leopard
Processor Speed 1.8GHz
1.25 GB DDR SDRAM

Oh and one other thing – When it comes to this stuff I am a helmet wearing, short bus rider so please be kind.:)

Thank You
 
Joined
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Your Mac's Specs
20" Intel iMac 2.4 Ghz/3G Ram/320HD, Snow Leopard. PBook G4, 1.5Ghz/1.5 Ram/250 HD, Leopard 10.5.6.
Mine did this, and then died. Is it making clicking noises when it's running?
 
Joined
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Your Mac's Specs
New iMac 20" Leopard vs. 10.5.7
hi there!

Yup, this problem can become very annoying at times! So, you've tried Disk Utility, and that doesn't work.

Then, in that case, i would suggest making sure that specific item has been specified to show up on the desktop when it is inserted.
To do this, go to your desktop, make sure Finder is the only app open, then click on the 'Finder' menu in the toolbar at the top of the screen. Click on Preferences. Then click on the tab at the top that reads 'General.' Now make sure each of the boxes are clearly 'checked' and blue.

Is it showing up anywhere else? Maybe in the Finder sidebar??


There may also be another way in which to get it to show up (this only shows up all the hidden files) - - -

Open up 'Terminal.' Which can be found in the utilities folder in the applications folder. Then, type the following command into Terminal:


defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall Finder

Does it show up now?
If it does great, if not, Im sorry, i dont know what else to do.


If it doesnt work, and you want to take those other files away that may have suddenly appeared on you dekstop, input this code into Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
killall Finder



Hope this helped!!
 

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