USB HDD Problem

I got a case for my 2.5" 20 gig drive from CompUSSR in the mac section so it matches my iBook but I can only get it to work in my PC, It is formatted Fat32 and it did work once in my mac but then never again I have tried reformatting and repartitioning the drive rebooting the ibook but nothing is working. I checked system profiler and it shows up as a usb storage device. How do I fix this? :bandage:

have you tried opening disk utility while its connected to see if its mounted? or if you can mount it? also, try booting your mac from panther install disk 1 and try to reformat the external that way.

o, also, try cliocking 'Go' in the finder and select computer and see if the hd is there.

Nope its not there in Go, It is in the profiler as loaded but in disk utility theres nothing cant mount or anything its very odd.

I know this wont be of much help , but do you mind telling me what model you have..(hdd enclosure) . because ive heard of a similar problem before .. this maybe a tad risky depending on how well you know unix , but are you able to see it in fdisk ? (from terminal) if so then you might try and delete the partitions on it from fdisk and then create new ones .. the mac may see it then .... also in the terminal if you give it an LS command then you might be able to see if it's there or if it's detected and just not mounting it .. try typing ls /dev and see what comes up there will be a bunch of stuff but it should be in there some where.. if so then you could possibly attempt to mount it manually ...

MrFuzzy said:

Nope its not there in Go, It is in the profiler as loaded but in disk utility theres nothing cant mount or anything its very odd.

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Since you have Windows, you should reformat to a different file system other than the one you have now. Then see if you can have your mac mount it. Then you would use "Disk Utility" to reformat it again to "MS-DOS File System", so you can still use it between Windows and Mac.

I used an external hard drive enclosure kit, and I wanted to reformat the hard drive into MS-DOS File System, but I could not find out how to do this on Windows. At the time, I used a Windows file system that my Mac could only read, but it would not write to it. But then I used my mac to reformat the hard drive to ms-dos, and it worked perfectly.

If you get the hard drive mounted after reformatting it, we'll help you to convert it to MS-DOS, if you are having trouble finding how to do it.

i tried reformatting it to ntfs still cant see it its very weird its in the profiler. It not in dev either what device would it be in the dev dir? disk1?

Well NTFS is not going to correct the problem, it'll only make it worse since Ntfs support on the mac is read-only.

Since you can see it in disk utility, maybe try formatting it again as Fat32.