Power Mac - Firewire drive won't mount

Hi there,

First post here, so please be gentle... :-) I hope this still counts as hardware, even though it's most likely a software click that's needed to get it to work.

After a long argument with my lovely wife about whether to buy a new PC to replace an over-stretched Vaio laptop, or resurrect my G4 (450Mhz dual processor running 10.2.8 (I think)) I actually managed to convince her to let the Mac enter our marriage.

It was a Kodak moment, believe me.

Anyway, I have a Formac 160Gb external firewire drive that I used to backup files, iPod libararies etc, and would like to use it on the G4. The problem is, Mr G4 doesn't see it. (The drive is just a normal hard-drive you'd find inside a Pc/G4 except in a case with an external power supply).

If I go into Disc Utility, the Formac is sitting there, laughing at me, but I can't mount the disc to use it.

So, I took it to work, hooked it into my G5 (mmmmmm) which instantly mounted it (though only in read mode, not read/write).

So, I tranferred off all 100Gb of files, re-initialised the drive as an MS-DOS one (so I can still use it on the Vaio if I need to - and it was in XP format) threw everything back onto it, took it home, and still no. It still pops up in Disc Utility, but won't actually mount to let me use it.

Anybody got any ideas on what I'm supposed to do? I'm 96% sure there's one thing I've not done to get this to mount properly - but I'm so brainwashed by PCs now that I can't think what it is.

Anyway help would be greatly appreciated. If you need any more information, please let me know and I'll provide it.

Thanks in advance.

Recess