I have the same problem,,, plug in usb and drive lights up, spins, fades, spins, fades spins...etc... Looks like its looking for something but the G4 never recognizes it as another drive... nothing comes up on the desktop or the disk utility. Plug the same WD external onto my two PCs and it's recognized and openable... have not reformatted the drive or done anything to it at all since I bought it (b/c I wanted it to back up the mac, not the pcs...) ??help??
SOURCE: WD Passport Essential 160gb with PowerBook G4
The problem is that your powerbook G4 does not provide enough power to your 160gb passport HD. This does not happens to the new Macs with intel inside.
There are several ways to fix it:
1) Go to West Digital Website and buy a "Power Buster Cable USB" (that connect your 2 USB ports to your passport HD in order to provide more power). I think that it costs 10$. This is the link: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/accessories.asp?ProdID=170
2) The other solution is easier. If you have an external USB hard drive with two USB ports, or a DVD/CD burner with two usb ports, you can pug your passport in one of the ports while the other HD or DVD/CD burner is connected to you PowerBook. You will be able to see and use your q60gb Passport HD.
SOURCE: my wd external hardrive is not recognized anymore
Hi. If you here some clicking noise then your external hard drive might be busted already.
Try to contact a local tech and see if he can still pull out your data from there.
Hope you'll be able to extract your files back.
Have a great weekend!!!
^_^
Testimonial: "Thanks dan hopefully I can take this to a comp tech who can extract my files. Too bad i didnt save the docs online :("
SOURCE: Mac not recognizing External Western Digital HD.
the problem is that your western digital operates using the NTFS (New Technology File System) which is the standard file system of Windows. Apple macs is not interopable with native NTFS therefore you need to install a read-write NTFS file-system driver on your mac.
an excellent free mac NTFS driver can be found here-
http://mac.softpedia.com/get/System-Utilities/NTFS-3G.shtml
download and install the software then restart your mac.
//javaftper
SOURCE: Hello, I bought a 250 wd
try other usb port, or other computer and see whether the hdd is detected. If still not, try to go to device manager ( http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000833.htm ), and then assign a drive letter to the hdd. After that, try to access it from Computer, if not able to access it, format it (use quick format) and then use asoftech data recovery program to recover your files. get the data recovery program from
http://www.asoftech.com/adr/
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