external fire wire hard drive
 

I just got a western digital fire wire/usb2.0 hd, i followed the directions to the "t", it showed up on my desk top, i clicked it, it disapeared!!.
I unplugged it from my system,reconnected it, nothing!
it is shown in my system profiler, but i cant find it anywhere, and the drive is showing my that it is on.
im triing to backup my files so i can install my brand new copy of panther which came in the mail today
any help is appreciated!

I think we need a little more information..

- have you formated this drive?

- I know you are trying to install panther but what OS do you have running atm?

- Do you have anything else plugged into the firewire?

- Have you tried to reboot the Mac?

- Which Mac is this?

- What does this mean? "i followed the directions to the "t", it showed up on my desk top, i clicked it, it disapeared!!. "

- IS this firewire drive a firewire 400 or 800?

Cheers,
--Zed :cool:

sorry i left out the improtant stuff.
here goes

disk formated-no it wont show up on my system

os-10.2.8

nothing else plugged in (fire wire)

reboot-yes

g4, 1.25 sngl proc, 512mb 6 months old

the manual from w/d stated
1- power up computer
2- plug in the power
3- plug one end of f/w into computer
4- plug opposite end into hard drive
(steps 1-4 completed)
"if your drive is larger than 128gb(no 120gb)the you MUST reinitialize your drive as mac system do not have 48-bit addresxsing support for FAT-32 volumes larger than 128gb. if your drive is less than 128gb(yes), this procedure is not required, although reinitializing in Mac OS is recommended for the highest performance and reliability."

5-go to APPS>Utilities>Disk Utility. select new h/d
6-select macos extended from volume format menu
7-select erase to begin format drive.

this is the farthest i got.
it stopped formating, i got the spinning beach ball of death, said something like cant mount drive eject drive now.
the drive had already dissapeared form my desktop,
however it is still being shown in my system profiler?

i followed steps 1-7 then something happened

hope with this info someone can help out.
thanks

Well that seems to show that the format failed.


disconnect the firewire drive and reconnect it, then try to format the drive again..

The drive should disappear from the finder when it's formated as it has to be dismounted while doing this..

You should still be able to talk to the drive using disk utils app...

Cheers,
--Zed :cool:

so i took the drive to a local mac retailer (different from where i purchesed the drive itself), plugged it into a mac, and presto! it worked. with restored faith, i brought it back to my house, plugged it in per the directions. nothing.

so i can obviously rule out that it is the drive causing the problem, but i dont know where to start as far as diagnosing my mac. the drive is listed in my fire wire information under the system profiler, but i cant seem to find it anywhere.

any guesses?
thanks in advance.

Did you use your FireWire cable or theirs when testing at the retailer?

-- Rob

yup. same one from the box.

so i did some reseach, found similar problems. i booted into os9.2 the drive worked. i then rebooted into osx (after about a min. wait while osx "waiting for local drives" during the startup) and......nothing .

drive doesnt show up in system profiler.

so i rebooted into os9.2 and .....nothing no fire wire devices found.

during this process, no adjustments were made to any connections between the drive and my system (ruling out any hardware issues i think)

any help would be greatly appreiciated!!

Return the drive? Or is that not an option?

i think it is more of a system issue, because it worked on another mac last night at comp usa.

http://discussions.info.apple.com/We...5577@.599f31b0

Ooops.. right. I read that late last night too.

Have you taken a peek at the /var/log/system.log or Console to see if there's any clues there?

im not sure how to perform the thing that you suggested.

im getting a message right now(that JUST disappeared) that said something like this drive doesnt contain volumes that mac can read. to continue initialize drive.

i click to initialize, my disk utility opened, the i got SBOD, then an error message that said the drive has been removed incorrectly

Right after trying to mount the drive, in the Terminal type:

tail -n25 /var/log/system.log

and/or, pre-mounting, open /Applications/Utilities/Console and then try and mount the drive and see what pops up in the Console.

Mac OS X Version 10.2.8 (Build 6R73)
Jan 10 14:35:40 randy-ludwigs-Computer /sbin/autodiskmount[195]: Some fsck failed!

Jan 10 14:35:40 randy-ludwigs-Computer /sbin/autodiskmount[195]: disk1s1 msdos yes yes WDC_Combo [not mounted]

2004-01-10 14:37:49.377 loginwindow[329] Could not find image named `bang'.

Hmm.. not good. It failed trying to check the file system on the drive. Then it thinks the drive is formatted in MSDOS? I must be reading that wrong. Off to the man pages for me!

man pages?
am i screwed?
if i exchange this drive for a new one,will i have the same issues?

man pages = manual pages in UNIX. RTFM for geeks.

Yes, acccording to fstab, it does think it's an MSDOS filesystem. I don't quite understand the intricasies of all the mount stuff.

man autodiskmount

Quote:

msdos a DOS compatible filesystem

And in Disk Utility, you cannot see this drive? But you can in OS 9?
What would happen if you booted in OS 9, opened Drive Setup, and reformatted this disk (zeroing all data)? Then reboot into OS X and see if you can mount the drive. You've got nothing to loose.

sorry ive been working on a few forum sites and im not sure what ive posted on either at this point.

drive is no longer working with my system in os9 either.

Can you check again to see if it's seen in Drive Setup (OS 9)? If it won't, I'd say you're screwed because the drive is totally confused. Hopefully someone with a better answer can chime in.

GO PATS!

due to the fact that im preatty new on a mac, would i be better off taking the drive back and exchanging it or have i messed up my system?

Another thing to try, unplug the drive, create a new admin user, log into said user, plug in the drive and see if you can see it in Disk Utility.

If you cannot see it in any OS X or OS 9 disk utilities to try and reformat it, I'd say that you've got 2 choices.
1) Do an Archive and Install (saving users) of your OS since the problem appears to have originated there. You said the drive worked in CompUSA.
or
2) Return it and try again. The drive's partition map might be so screwed up now that it doesn't know which end is up.

thanks for all of your help.
ill give your recommendations a shot and will let you know the outcome.

enjoy the game

well it worked.

i took back my western digital external hard drive, exchanged for a Acom data external hard drive (which actually came with a DETAILED manual)
plugged it in, an Bingo!! backup bliss!! Wish me luck on my upgrade to the black cat tomorrow.

Thanks to everyone for their help with my issues especially yellow! greatly appreciated!!

hey yellow, last i saw the pats were up by three, with about 1:45 left in the game. did your team beat the titans?

Glad to hear you got rid of that thing. Good luck with Panther. Check out this long thread for some tips on installing Panther.

Yes! Next stop, AFC Championship!! Close games give me heart attacks. But it wouldn't be a true Patriots game if there wasn't a chance that they could loose it all..

I'm jumping in here but I think your issue is with the disk utility. It has to see the drive to reformat it. Until you format it for Mac, the Mac OS will never see the drive in the Finder. So if your utility for formatting is failing to see the drive then try to find out why.

If the other Macs (at the store) can see it, then have their utilities reformat it, then bring it home and try again.