I have an old fandom drive. FDF12072S. FireWire. I have a new Mac mini. and bought a 6 pin to 9 pin cable. plugged in but the drive is not showing up. do I need software or will this drive. jus

SOURCE: hd does not show up on desktop.

check hdd out on another mac ibook g4 or any mac then if it does same then you know I's the hdd not your mac but if hdd is accepted then you have big conflicts on your mac it will need reinstalling then retest hdd if loads ok then all is fine problem resolved

SOURCE: Drive not showing up on my Mac

It's possible. Has it worked before? Does it work on other computers? If it has worked, has it worked on this computer before? Can it be connected via USB (some externals have both) and does it work that way? Can you hear the drive spinning when it's powered on? On your mac, open up a terminal (maximize the window), plug in your drive and type this in the terminal dmesg This will output a ton of stuff, but the last 20 lines or so should be relevant to the last event, namely, connecting your drive. Copy that text to here and we'll take a look at what's going on. If you're feeling adventurous, you could take it out of the external case, mount it in your tower, and see if it's visible that way. Do NOT try this unless you know what you're doing. It's possible to really mess up your system. But if you've been in the case before and are comfortable with installing drives, this could be worth a shot.

SOURCE: i have a new portable hard drive which won't show up on my imac

did you format it using a mac formation?

SOURCE: Stored stuff with a Mac and need to back it up in XP

As they are 2 different operating systems it is highly unlikely.

SOURCE: use my drive on Mac..

Both OSs have different Security Architectures. NTFS for Windows and HFS+ for MAC. So if you modify these permissions (you could) your MAC OS might not be able to access it properly. But MAC will read NTFS permission (But not write onto the disk).