hope this is the right forum to post in, having trouble with a portable drive

Hey guys.

I'm having immense problems with getting my Powerbook G4, running Tiger, to recognize my LaCie 80 GB USB-only Porsche design (supposedly the design makes a difference, I don't know why) portable drive. I have seen other threads in this forum with other users who've been having problems with their drives, but I've tried all the solutions and so far nothing has worked.

LaCie's website has a driver that is supposed to make everything compatible and working, but it does not seem to be installing correctly. When I attempt to install the driver with the drive disconnected, I receive a message saying that nothing that needs updating has been detected. However, with the drive connected, I get no message at all! According to the instructions that come with the driver, I'm supposed to receive a message that says such and such needs updating.

the drive is configured to work on both Macs and PCs, and up until now has been working perfectly. Also the drive, when connected, makes a clicking noise which I am told is the drive attempting to read itself, but it is unable to. The light on the front also constantly flickers between red and orange, when normally it stays orange.

It shows up under USB in disk utilities. I am not sure if this is pertinent, because I don't know if this is normal, but its version is listed as being "0.00".

I have tried both USB ports, with the same results. The problem does not seem to be with the ports themselves, as they accepted other drives and a tablet perfectly. This drive has no Firewire ports, so that isn't an option.

I'm absolutely at my wits' end here. Can anyone help me out?

Those hard drives are not the best they fail really easily in my experience with them which is what appears to have happened to you. Although we will not jump to conclusions and we run through some things to make sure that the drive is not dead.

So you can see it in disk utility but nowhere else on the machine? If you can see it in disk utility can you try to mount it by clicking on the mount button on the top of the screen. What happens when you try this?

If nothing happens at all when you try the above let us know any way, and then continue to try this. It might possibly be the computer that is having problems not the drive although I doubt it because you tried both ports, and it is a new (?) powerbook. So the only way to test to see if it is truely the drive and not the computer would be to check to see if it shows up on another computer. Try plugging it into one of the other computers in the house (prefferably a mac but you said it works on windows too so try a windows computer if thats all you have)

If it works on the other computers and then it still could be the drive.. If it worked on another mac then there is most likely something wrong with your powerbook, if it worked on a windows system, it could have something to do with formatting it, plop it back into your mac and open up disk utility and then format it for mac (hfs+)

good luck.

Thanks for replying!

I think I forgot to mention some stuff, plus I made something of a mistake. It does not show up in disk utility, it shows up in system profiler...oops. So no, I can't try to mount it there.

The drive works fine when plugged into a PC, and also works fine when plugged into other Macs. However, the other Macs are running older versions of OS X, not Tiger, which I'm kind of wondering has anything to do with it...

P.S. Sorry about that double post, I'll have to read the rules more carefully next time.

Zaphkiel said:

P.S. Sorry about that double post, I'll have to read the rules more carefully next time.

Click to expand...

its ok, just don't do it any more.. everybody makes mistakes.

has this drive ever worked on your powerbook previously.. ie before the update?

I bought the powerbook really recently. Like... Wednesday recently, so it came with Tiger already.