IBook G4 not recognizing external drive

I have an iBook G4 w/OS10.3.9. Up until the past couple of days, I have been able to regularly backup my internal drive to both my Iomega and Maxtor USB drives. Now when I connect them, I either get a message indicating that they are not readable and asking if I want to format or ignore, or they just don't show up on the desktop. They work fine on my Macbook Pro w/Leopard. I also just ran Disk Warrior as well as defragging and repairing w/Drive Genius. Still is not working. The name of the drive will show up on Disk Utilities, but the verify and repair buttons are not highlighted. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Al

May be some help on these links.
USB and FireWire Quick Assist
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1151?viewlocale=en_US
Common fixes for USB device issues (unrecognized, etc.)
http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20070824012114701
 Cheers, Tom

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Start by looking for the drive in the Apple System Profiler (from the Apple menu's far left Apple logo>About This Mac>More Info>Hardware (in left column) >USB.) If the drive is correctly powered and connected, it will show up here.
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Hope this helps

Not recognizing external drive - WD in an Enclosure...

I hate to post this given all the other posts wrt external drive not working - wish I'd read those before making a purchase....
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WD drive mechanisms work very well. Most of my drives are currently WD, including the one that came installed inside my iMac. I like them because they seem to run quiet and cool. It's the Western Digital branded external drive enclosures that I've seen negative commentary about in various forums.
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Ibook does not recognize external drive.

Hi,
I have a G3 ibook running 10.2x and it won't recognize my maxor external drive which was formatted fat32. All other macs I'd tried can read it. I have installed the software (for backing up) and when its running it can detect the drive, but the finder will not show it. Is there a driver or an update I can use?
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IBOOK G3 Mac OS X (10.2.x) 600 mrtz

Welcome to Apple Discussions!
FAT32 formatting is not ideal for backing up. Unfortunately you will only be able to use it for data file backing up. Many applications rely on resource files and keeping the same filenaming conventions and permissions to run smoothly in Mac OS X. FAT32 does not observe Mac OS X's conventions for this. If that does not matter to you, and there is no data on the drive you want to preserve currently, use Apple's Disk Utility to reformat it. If there is data you want to preserve on it, find out if it is readable by a PC and offload that data to another drive, and then reformat it with that Mac. It may be the drive requires a specific firmware update to work in 10.2, and that you may only be able to get from the manufacturer. Though usually Disk Utility in any version of Mac OS X will give it its blessing when you erase the drive.
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Disk Identifier : disk4s1
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I've tried everything with this USB 2.0 external drive. It was formatted in NTFS, MacBook did not recognize it when I plugged it in. It does not even show up in Disk Utility. The only place that the system even recognizes that there is something plugged into it is in System Profiler:
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Hi all,
Hi,
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and this on How-To convert back to Basic Disks (which Macs can use): http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb%3Ben-us%3B309044&x=15&y=14
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Hi all,
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Robin Ryan wrote:
Hi all,
I woke up the other day to a black screen and a frozen macbook pro (4 months old). It wouldn't boot up past the gray screen, so I tried to repair the drive with the install disc. It said that there are no errors (liar!), so I wiped it and tried to restore from my latest Time Machine backup (should be the day prior).
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Migration assistant in OSX doesn't see my external drive, even though I can access it through finder.
I just want my system back to what it looked like prior to my crash. Shouldnt Time Machine have this capability?
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You should take your question to the Time Machine forum. More experts there on TM than you can ever imagine.
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=1342

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Start by looking for the drive in the Apple System Profiler (from the Apple menu's far left Apple logo>About This Mac>More Info>Hardware (in left column) >USB.) If the drive is correctly powered and connected, it will show up here.
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