USB Hard Drive Wont show

I have taken my USB 500gb hard drive out of my windows computer t plug into my macbook but when i plug it in, nothing happens and it dosent show a shortcut to the hard drive on my desktop.

About a month ago when i first got the hard drive it worked on my mac no problems and i havent done anything to it since so im not sure why it is not working.

When i open up Disk utility it shows the hard drive but says its unmounted. I click mount but nothing seems to happen. It is a NTFS filesystem on the hdd, but mac should be able to read this?


Any Ideas?

bump.. help anyone?

mac can only read FAT32 and HFS. Since your drive is NTFS it can only read to it, not write to it

yeah i know that a mac should be able to only read NTFS, but it wont even read it. Normaly when i attatch a storage device is just normaly shows up on the desktop but my hard drive is not doing this. The last time i attatched it which was about a month ago it worked fine.

tobywuk,
Are you running a virtual machine on your Mac, perchance? I have the same problem (Mac not acknowledging a USB drive) when I have Windows running under Fusion. Fusion won't let both operating systems access a drive at once (nor should any other virtual machine software).

I have Parallels installed on my mac but it was not actually running when i attatched the hard drive.

I will try it again once i have leopard installed on my macbook

Neo said:

tobywuk,
Fusion won't let both operating systems access a drive at once (nor should any other virtual machine software).

Click to expand...

Maybe this is a bit off topic (although I am experiencing my own disk problems, have a VM, and external drive), but why on Earth shouldn't you be able to access a common drive between two systems? Seems to me that an external hard drive would be a perfect neutral ground for two systems to share files.

Forgive me for my naivety... I'm a recent switcher myself...

J

You can access a common drive between two systems, just not at the same time. I think it's a good idea, so you don't open the file in XP, edit it in OS X, then try to save in XP. Corruption ensues!

On the other hand, Fusion (virtual machine software) allows sharing between both systems in real-time. For instance I can take a picture with my MacBook's iSight, adjust the photo with Photo Shop in XP, save the picture to the Mac hard drive, then flip to my mail program in OS X and send the picture from my Mac Desktop to my family. I can also be doing word processing in XP...copy part of a letter to the Clipboard, flip to OS X, and paste it directly to a webpage I'm working on there. It's really nice.

But you're right, it's off-topic.

I also have parallels installed on my Mac and i think the reason why you don't see it on your Mac and neither do I is because with Parallels, it recognizes all usb drives and connects to XP by default. I think and i haven't tested this out yet, if you go into parallels, configuration editor....

There is a little box that says "connect usb devices automatically", if you try and uncheck that option, see if your external will re-appear...

Try and give that a try, not sure if it will work though as i haven't tried it, but it came to mind

I just tried my hard drive for the first time since upgrading to leopard and it seems to be working fine now. odd.