Trouble recognizing external hard drive

ok, so I had my mac g4 PowerBook become victim to a bad beverage spill, mother board fried. The hard drive had very valuable info on it so I took the laptop to have the hard drive removed and put in an external casing.
Now I currently use an iMac intel based system, so I assumed that my old hard drive would connect and work no questions asked. The icon for the drive will not show up and does not appear in the disk utility. It does however read in the system console log: "the IOUSBFamily is having trouble enumerating a USB device that has been plugged in. It will keep trying". So to me that means the computer sees it but can't do anything.. I have no idea what to do someone help! I need the data on this disc baadly
Other info:
The external casing is made by icy dock, and the model # on that is MB 448UA
It plugs in via USB and I don't think this is a power issue because the drive does turn on and stay on.

Welcome to Apple Discussions!
Sounds like you have an incompatible USB hard drive case. There are some that just simply won't work with Macs without the proper firmware. Best to get a case from http://www.macsales.com/ or http://www.cooldrives.com/ and best to get a Firewire one. You can't use the Migration Assistant though. You'll have to migrate over whatever documents, and make sure all your applications work either with Rosetta or Universal.

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Message was edited by: lisuhhx

I am having this same problem all of a sudden. My external hd shows up in disk utility; however, it does not show up under devices or is it recognized any more by time machine. When I try and repair it, the repair fails and list a "invalid node structure" and "volume check failed". I disconnect the external hd's power source and firewire connection, reconnected, and this did nothing.
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Trouble recognizing external hard drive

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