incompatible external hard drive (?)

[susanj]

Last year I bought a LOGITEC external hard drive (in Japan).
It's 80GB and plugs in with two USB cords.

It works on my old iBook G4 which operates on 10.3.9
It's icon simply appears on the desktop after about 15 seconds.

It also works on my PC and on a Mac G5 operating on 10.4.4

BUT it WON'T work on my new iBook G4 which operates on 10.4

Does anyone out there know why, or what I can do???

 

[casdvm]

Susan:

Have you tried all the port combinations to make sure that you have no 'dead' ports on either the iBook or the hard drive? You should also test all the cables as well just to be sure that all the hardware is functional.

 

[tgcujo]

Maybe you shoud download the 4.5 update (free update) from apple.com because it might work on that.
It says it fixes compatibility with some third party devices and mounting windows formatted drives.

About this update

The 10.4.5 Update is recommended for all users and includes general operating system fixes, as well as specific fixes for the following applications and technologies:

-iChat video conferencing
-Safari rendering of web pages
-usability of Dashboard and widgets
-viewing of QuickTime streaming media behind a firewall
-printing to some Epson printer models
-iDisk and Portable Home Directory syncing
-time zone and daylight savings for 2006 and 2007
-VPN connections to Cisco servers when using NAT
-using and mounting Windows formatted storage devices
-compatibility with third party applications and devices
-previous standalone security updates

 

[tgcujo]

You can download if from http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/macosxupdate1045.html

 

[Ric]

Hi Susan,

If you have tried all the excellent suggestions above...and still no joy !

Then I would back up everything on the external drive, then using Disk Utility on the Mac, Reformat it using the "MSDOS" option...this will make it FAT32 which should mount on all your Macs and PC's...

regards

Ric

 

[susanj]

Thank you for all your help and responses.
Updating to 10.4.5 seems to have done the trick!

well done!

 

[Ric]

Hi there,

glad you've got it working !

regards

Ric