Issues with external hard drives: Help Please!

Just got my new (and first) Mac Pro this week.

I have two Maxtor ONE TOUCH external drives (250gig and 300gig)
that I originally had running under Windows.

I am not certain if I formatted the drives under Windows or not, but INDIVIDUALLY hooked up through a FIREWIRE connection, the Mac Pro did recognize its contents.

The problem, however, occurs when I try to plug BOTH drives
into the two firewire ports and turn them BOTH on at once. The
Mac will only display ONE of the drives, not both.

Is this normal?

Also, is the Macintosh able to read and write to external drives over 200GB? I thought I read that this was a problem (though I may be wrong).

Thanks in advance!

have you tried one firewire and one usb?

also, not that this would interfere with seeing them, but are they formatted ntfs or fat32? you'll run into problems editing creating or deleting files on ntfs, fat32 will give you full access on mac and windows.

Yes, I should have mentioned, I have tried one USB and one FIREWIRE. Still only one hard drive shows up, not two. If I hook either one to Firewire as a single unit it shows up -- but try to hook up two at once, no deal.

I'm going to look to see if these have been formatted in FAT32 (as you recommend).

Question: On the mac Pro can I simply right click and look at drive properties to see how that external was formatted? If not, how can I tell? Also can I reformat the drives in FAT32 by right clicking on them?

Thank You for all the assistance!

On the Mac, to get the full scoop on the drive, click on the drive's desktop icon and use the CMD+I keystroke (Get Info). This will pop up a little window that tells you lots of good stuff about the drive, including its format.

To reformat, you need to start Disk Utility, in your Utilities folder (access it with the SHFT+CMD+U keystroke set). Highlight the drive and then click over to the Erase "tab" in the right had part of the Disk Utility window. From there you can select the format type you want and kick off the process.

Do note that formatting can take some time, and it has been my experience that Disk Utility doesn't provide much (if any) feedback while it is doing it. So, you just have to wait it out...

That works!

Now...once I format my 250GB and 300GB drive to FAT32 I am
guessing my Mac Pro will have no problem reading and writing
to the entire drives?

Also...

Is Mac OS Extended a proper format