Adding external hard drive space to eMac - help please??

Hi - I have just purchased a 320gb Seagate external HD as my 80G eMac HD is maxed out with pics, itunes, games etc etc...thanks to my kids!
I must be naive, but thought it would be as simple as "plug and play", but have not been able see the External Hard Drive (EHD) appear in Finder or Desktop, once tied in through firewire or USB ports.
When I follow the instructions available from online support, it's not enough to get a solution.
Can I please get some help....any ideas???
thanks Mac friends
Kieren
eMac Mac OS X (10.3.9)
eMac Mac OS X (10.3.9)

Kieren,
Welcome to the Apple Discussions!
Use the Firewire connection; a USB 2.0 model eMac can in theory use a USB connection, but the drivers for USB hard drives is problematic. The Firewire connection will be both more robust and faster in practice (USB 2.0 is nominally rated faster than Firewire 400, but in real-world thransfers, Firewire wins).
With the external HD connected, open Applications> Utilities> System Profiler and check under the Firewire heading. Does the drive show up at all? Do you have any other Firewire devices attached? If there are other Firewire devices attached, dismount and disconnect them. If no Firewire devices shows up, or more tellingly, if the Firewire bus itself doesn't show up in System Profiler, it's possible that a power glitch may have caused the Firewire bus to latch up. Reset the Firewire bus triple fuses by removing all peripherals other than the keyboard and mouse, then removing the power cord from the side of the eMac (to remove the trickle current drawn by modern electronics even when nominally off) and waiting 15+ minutes. Then reattach the power cord only restart the Mac. Check Apple’s System Profiler (in Applications/ Utilities) and confirm that the Firewire bus is recognized. Reattach peripherals one at a time, checking System Profiler after each to confirm the addition is recognized.
If the external HD still doesn't appear in the Finder, open Applications> Utilities> Disk Utility and see if the drive appears in the leftmost window pane of that program. If it does, you can use Disk Utility to reformat the drive as Mac OS Extended / HFS+
If none of these steps help, I'd wonder if the drive itself is bad and should be exchanged. Check the drive on a different computer.
Once you have the drive avaialbale on your Mac, you can use Disk Utility to partition the drive. I'd suggest making the first partition a little larger than your present internal hard drive; you can then use a third-party utility such as CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper! to clone the internal hard drive to the first partition of the external hard drive as a bootable backup. Then if there's a problem with the internal hard drive, you can use Startup Manager to boot from the external drive.
You'll also want to look over:
iTunes: Moving your iTunes Music folder
iPhoto: How to move the iPhoto Library Folder
Try to keep between 1 to 5 GB free space on the internal boot hard drive (depending on whether you burn CD-R or DVD-R discs) to allow for necessary cache and swap files

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Adding external hard drive space to eMac - help please??

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