HEEEEEEEEEEELP!!! Can't See Hard Drive anymore!

So I skipped upgrading my Mac computers to Tiger and I upgraded from 10.3.7 whatever that is to 10.5 Leopard! Yay! No...

I have 3 important hard drives that I can not see anymore after doing this. I have two macs... a power mac and a powerbook. Both computers can't see the hard drives anymore. So I rolled the powerbook back from Leopard to Panther/or/Jaguar... 10.3.7, (I backed up all my files, but I lost all my programs)... BUT YAY!!! my hard drive pops up! DETECTED! Huh? Well I knew it would but why won't they work with Leopard? Isn't upgrading operating systems supposed to make things more compatible??? This makes no sense.

So I called Mac and after hours of troubleshooting trying to find the drives in BIOS, and pushing the pmu button, and resetting ram, and looking at the disk utility through installer, my techie says that I should try reformatting the drives in FAT32 or HFS extended and or journalled... he convinced me that the drives were NTFS when they weren't but I was desperate to try anything so... blah blah blah... I had to move out 300 GB of video footage just to clear out one of the drives see if this would work.

After I erased one drive... I plugged the drive into my PC and it detected it no problem. I formatted to FAT32... but that didn't make it detectable on Leopard... I plugged it into my powerbook OS X 10.3.7 and I formatted to HFS extended... still didn't read on Leopard.

So now what... this is totally bugged! I'm usually good at googling problems and finding the solutions in forums, but I have scoured the internet for answers and nothing. Now I have to try and start a thread for answers... it seems no one has had this problem.

I'm looking at the specs of the hard drive...

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10
SATA 3.0 GB/s 320GB

no support for Mac on Seagate's web site. Maybe it's the HDD Enclosure. Does it give the Hard Drive enough power to run on Leopard??? Specs are:

Mascot 3/5" HDD Enclosure

I am begging for your help! I need these drives as they have all my Final Cut Pro video footage on them and I can not work without these drives. I will be buying a new enclosure box today to see if that might solve anything, but if you know anything I could try... please, please help me!

your problem is strange since there is no reason why a drive would not be seen by Leopard. Even if they were NTFS, Leopard can still read from them

How are your drives powered, do they have their own power, does disk utility see anything at all

louishen said:

your problem is strange since there is no reason why a drive would not be seen by Leopard. Even if they were NTFS, Leopard can still read from them

How are your drives powered, do they have their own power, does disk utility see anything at all

Click to expand...

Yes totally strange isn't it? Nothing comes up in disk utility except for the main hard drive of course. So... the drives are powered by a HDD Enclosure. This is my next step in solving the problem as I came across this little tidbit of information...

http://www.mascot-tek.com.tw/product_ee352.htm

Notice on this site that the operating system compatibility only go up to OS X 9.0!!! I think I have solved my problem! Not to get my hopes up, but I was thoroughly excited that this is a reasonable explanation. I am going out to buy a new enclosure today. I will let you know what happens tomorrow as I have to go to a wedding all day... my day job.
Thanks for your reply!

you shouldn't need new enclosures, its says Mac OS 9 or later which includes OS X.

Have you got them plugged in with their 12V power supply or are you just hooking them up with USB only

To the OP:

I didn't see where the specs for the HDD enclosures you purchased say that they're SATA compatible? If not, that may be your problem. Your Seagate Barracuda definitely needs SATA before it can be "seen".

Regards.

I fixed the problem. It was the enclosure. Thanks chscag about the SATA info, but actually I was mistaken... it turned out that my drive was ATA, not SATA. But nonetheless, it was the type of enclosure. I switched to a cheap Dynex and now all my drives are detected. Unbelievable. Don't ever buy a Mascot Drive Enclosure!