Lacie HDs + carbon copy cloner

Hi all. I bought myself a LaCie 160gb hd which is all great, and i downloaded carbon copy cloner as i'd read a previous post on here that said it was the easiest way to back up your system.

BUT... when i open ccc, even with the HD up and running and on the desktop, it gives me a message saying it can't find any disks mounted on my system apart from the system disk.

what's going on?

Is the LaCie disk formated for the Mac? If not, reformat it and try again.

Is the LaCie drive mounted and an icon displayed on your desktop, showing that it is available for use.

funnily enough i solved the problem but there seems to be no logic to it.
i could see a drive, it was formatted and everything, disk utility told me it was mounted but ccc refused to play ball.

so i partitioned the drive into two and then - hey presto - all was well. backup achieved.

still doesn't make sense though, not to me anyway.

You don't mention the mac model but some older ones have problems recognizing large drives. I think 128 gb is the cut-off. By partitioning you probably created two partitions within the limit. The important thing is that it worked.