External Hard-Drive won't come up

My friend just bought a MacBook Pro and opened it no more than an hour ago.
He has Snow Leopard on it and purchased a Western Digital My Book to bring files from his PC to his Mac. The device connects and can be read on his PC but on his Mac it isn't appearing. All that comes up when it is plugged in is "Time Machine Backups"

Please help, how can we get the drive to show up so it can be accessed and the files transfered?! If more details are needed they can be provided.

How is the WD Drive formatted?
It needs to be FAT 32 to be able to be read by PC and Mac.

Ok, so if it is not formatted correctly, is there anyway it could be reformatted?

Does the drive come up in disk utility?
If so then you can there format the drive as FAT 32.

Yes it can be seen in disk utility, just not the desktop or volumes folder.
Also can I reformat and keep all the data on the drive?
How can I reformat it in Disk Utility?? Thanks!

Just open up Disk Utility go to tab :erase and then select MS DOS FAT from the drop down menu and you're good to go...

hope this helps

Thank you very much!!

You're welcome, do visit us again...

I have a similar problem.

I just added a new WD Elements External USB Drive. It shows up on my iMac, but it will only format as FAT32, not as Mac Format.

I want to use it to backup my system with SuperDuper before trying Snow Leopard.

Any advice please?

Isn't there a default set in Snow Leopard that doesn't show External Drives on the desktop? Mine was set up like that. All I had to do was hit Command+J (Show View Options) with Finder active which brings up a menu. Check the box next to External Devices to have them show up on the desktop.

I wonder if this is the problem some people are having.

I haven't installed SL yet. I want to do a Backup first.

I can see the drive in Disk Utility but it will only format as FAT rather than any of the Mac options. The drive mounts and I see it on my Desktop and in Finder, but it will not work with SuperDuper unless it is Mac format.

It is the same size and make (although not the same model) as my other drive - which is formatted to a Mac format and works with Time Machine.

Nighthawk4 said:

I haven't installed SL yet. I want to do a Backup first. I can see the drive in Disk Utility but it will only format as FAT rather than any of the Mac options. The drive mounts and I see it on my Desktop and in Finder, but it will not work with SuperDuper unless it is Mac format.

Click to expand...

If you can "see" the drive in Disk Utility it can be formatted to HFS+ unless the drive is locked. Have you tried erasing it first and then formatting?

Regards.

I tried rebooting with the Install Disk (for Leopard, not SL).

This can format the disk as FAT and does attempt to format it for Mac format. However, this does not seem to finish. I left it for at least 2 hours and it did not finish.

How long should it actually take to format 1Tb in Mac format? I tried with journalled and non-journalled - same result.

The only thing I noticed is that whilst it is supposedly formatting, it says 'not a multiple of 4kb'. Does that seem significant, or is it just for information?


Edit - how do I erase and then format? All I can find is the Erase option - which actually seems to be Format.

I managed to resolve this, although I still don't know why it didn't work from the start.

I used disk utility to partition the new disk into 2 partitions, then formatted each of those. It did that in a few moments.

The backup took a lot longer, but now I can boot from the backup drive and I still have a spare partition - for another backup or other archiving.

Odd that it would not format as one partition since it is the same size and make as my Time Machine drive.