western digital hd won't show

Hello. I recently bought a Western Digital My Passport Essential 320gb HD for my Mac OS X version 10.4.11 and quickly realized my mistake when I noticed the software is not compatible with a mac. This HD will not even appear on my desktop when plugged in by USB. Please help. There must be a way.

Does it show up on the left hand side of /Application/Utilities/Disk Utility.app? It could very well be unformatted. If it does show up, it will have to be formatted. See this article for a howto.

no i have checked this and been to several help pages and i can still not figure out why it does not show up anywhere.

According to the product page and not unsurprisingly, the HD works on a Mac (a HD is a HD - only a few won't work with OS X). Are you sure that the HD isn't defective? Can you try it on another computer?

In addition to what Van has replied to you.....

1. Make sure you try the drive from another USB port. It could be that the drive is not receiving enough power to spin up. I have had this happen on occasion with certain portable USB drives.

2. Check to see if there is a read only or protect switch on the back of the drive. It may have to be turned on in order to be recognized. I'm not familiar with this particular drive and do not know if there is one.

3. More than likely this drive is formatted to NTFS. So when you do get it to spin up and recognized, you'll need to erase and reformat with HFS+ to use it with Time Machine.

Regards.

thanks for both of your responses. i have tried both usb ports with no success. i just plugged it into a macbook 10.5.7 and it pops up with no problem at all. so the harddrive is fine. and my ipod plugs into both of my usb ports with no problems there.

any further suggestions?

If the drive worked on another machine it should work on yours - although you really haven't told us what machine you have. You only stated that you were using Tiger (10.4.11).

According to WD, the drive ships with a dual USB cable. Have you tried using that cable (in other words, attaching it to two ports at once)?

Your iPOD requires much less current to operate than an external 320 GB drive so that really is not an indication the USB ports on your machine are capable.

Regards.