My portable hard drive is not recognized by my Mac G4 power book

Hello Leean,

You can take the portable hard drive from your HP Desktop. But when you connect your hard drive in Mac machine it will not recognize it. Because the hard have NTFS partition and the Mac operating system will only recognize HFS & HFS+ partition.

You can only use the NTFS partitioned hard drive on Mac machine if it have Parallels OS. Parallels allow you to connect your NTFS partitioned hard drive in mac machine.

click start control panel administrive tools ,computer management ,device manager scroll down universal serial bus controllers you should see a yellow question mark?
right click to reinstall drivers
make sure the lead/s that attach to this drive have a secure seating and are not bad/faulty the light on only tells that its getting power it might not be getting enough power you might test the lead/s or
just replace the cable of the hard disk, when you plugged the external disk drive you got that windows could recognize the USB device change the cable everything should work fine again, sometimes the wires inside the cable will be damaged due to bending or stretching or placing heavy equipment upon the cable,
hope this helps

i think that it may not have bin the battery but the mac. it could be that that the censers to recognize the battery are broken

you must choose the format you wanna run on your hdd.mac and pc aren't the same.

If your system detects the connected device that is a good start. Was the drive formatted for another operating system? Certainly try the drive on another system and/or another drive on your system.

it mostliky ly not combatible

If your Firelite SmartDisk was formatted for a PC, and you are using the Mac side of the G4 it won't. They use a different format scheme. Need to load Parallel, bootcamp, or another virtual PC program, and then Windows. Using that it will recognize it.

If you know another Mac user that is using both sides (Mac and Virtual PC) is a quick way to retrieve data to move it. Be careful reformatting the FireLite. There are some more complex ways. Hope that this helps.

AAirwolf

PS: I use a 160GB FireLite on my G4, MacBook Pro as well as my Tower and notebook PCs.

NTFS file system on Hard drive .
http://www.macyourself.com/2012/03/11/how-to-format-a-drive-for-mac-and-pc-compatibility/

I would suspect a corrupted catalog file, these are the map that a comupter uses to find its way around the drive, they are also the first casualty when a crash corrupts something. Disc warrior will write a new catalog and fix everything. PCs do not see discs formatted for macs.

hey im the same person who just posted above. i went to WD's website, and it said unplug the hard drive from the computer, and unplug it from the power source. then plug it into the power outlet, wait for it to spin up, then plug it in via USB/Firewire, whatever. it worked for me, so hopefully it will work for you.