Mac mini won't read external hard drive

Hey all!
I have a 4.0 gb WDC hard drive (AC24 300L Media if that means anything to you) that I pulled out of an old beige Mac power PC, put in one of those USB hard drive enclosures, and am now trying to read with my Mac mini running OS X. The drive shows up in the disk utility but I can't seem to read or write. In my ignorance I figured a newish mac should be able to read an oldish mac drive, but I am no whiz at file systems so there you go. It is also (not surprisingly) not read/writable by my Thinkpad though it also shows up as a usb device there. Needless to say I would rather not format this drive because it contains important data that was being stored on the old power pc. Any thoughts?
-Megan

Welcome to Mac-Forums!

First job is to transfer the valuable data from Win to Mac via some other source, eg. flash drive or optical disk. That is not a difficult task, just time-consuming.

Your supposition is right - MacOS X should be able to read an external device that shows in Disk Utility. That suggests that the external WDC is formatted as Win-only, or is partitioned.

Sorry to jump in on this thread; however, as I still have an old PowerMac 6500 lurking in a cupboard somewhere, you just gave me confidence that I could retrieve the information from it when I buy my new Mac Then I can dispose of the old one and make space for .... well, quite a lot really!

I'm bookmarking this thread in case I need to ask for instructions

Margaret

To the OP, do you remember which version of Mac OS or System was on your old Power PC Mac? It should work but I can try it here. Just need to know the OS version just in case there is some difference somewhere.

Good point dtravis, and looking back through this post, I realise that my suggestion of transferring via flash drive or optical disk may not work - depending on the OS of that old drive.

A case in point - I removed an old IBM BigFoot 5.25" drive from a Win PC. Thinking it was of no use, I was about to throw it out, but stopped when I realised I could connect it to any one of my computers (with OS X) via a USB-IDE adaptor.

That may be the way for the OP to go, ie. take the old drive out of the enclosure, and use an adaptor instead. Here's an example (there are cheaper options available - check Amazon) Search Results for universal drive adapter at MacSales.com.

Further to that, the older the OS X version on the Mini the better - maybe - meaning that compatibility with whatever's on the old drive may suit, for example, Panther, which includes Classic (OS 9). [hint, hint, mshelby, please post your Mac specs.]

thinehost said:

Sorry to jump in on this thread; however, as I still have an old PowerMac 6500

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Welcome aboard! I'd suggest an adaptor for your situation too. The drive inside the 6500 is ATA, and an adaptor would connect that via USB to your later Mac without difficulty (he said optimistically ).

Old drives can be used 'bare' via adaptor for storage, even as backup, although transfer is slow compared with internal ATA or firewire.

hughvane said:

Welcome aboard!

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Hi, thanks for the welcome - and for the suggestion. I hadn't even considered using the old drive as storage - cool idea.

Margaret

I couldn't get my external to show up on Macbook, I simply plugged it into a windows pc, formatted it (after copying all data to another source) and plugged it back in