USB 2.0 External HDD

[jbsengineer]

I have a external 2.5" drive in a usb housing. it's one of the ION drives. anyway. Windows will read it fine, etc. I unallocated all the space and plugged it into the mac. It doesn't pick it up in the disk utility. Any ideas? Is there a 3rd party program i'll have to buy to find usb 2.0 drives...doesn't make sense.. It's supposed to be mac compatible.

Josh

 

[jbsengineer]

btw, the drive shows up in the system profiler as a "USB High-Speed Bus" --> USB2.0 Storage Device

 

[Macman]

what format is it? if you want it to be mac and pc, format as fat32, and partition due to fat32's size limits.

 

[jbsengineer]

what format is it? if you want it to be mac and pc, format as fat32, and partition due to fat32's size limits.

i had it at 2 fat32 20gig partitions. disk utility would not pick it up and the system profiler could see it. so i unallocated all the space. still the same thing.

Josh

 

[jbsengineer]

well i found a program that helped me out. i used MACDRIVE. it's a windows application for reading mac drives. it was able to format the drive as APPLE HFS. then the powerbook could read it. so i formatted it as ms-dos in the powerbook disk utility.

strange that when even i formatted it as fat32 in windows the powerbook still didn't read it. anybody experience this???

 

[jbsengineer]

update.... right after i posted the above i plugged the newly "MS-DOS" formatted drive into my windows. Windows picked it up fine as a FAT32 drive. So i unplugged it and put it in my powerbook. Doesn't read it again. Very strange.

Josh