My G4 won't recognize my WD My Book external hard drive.

I've spent an hour just trying to find out how to post a question in the right place. I hope someone out there can help me out. I can't seem to find my exact issue. I just purchased a Western Digital "My Book Essential Edition 2.0 1TB". I have a MacBook 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo running OSX 10.4.11 and a 1GHz Power PC G4 also running OSX 10.4.11. My laptop recognizes the external drive without incident, but the G4 will see it in the disk utility, but not in the finder or on the desktop. When I try to partition it or erase it as suggested in some of the discussions here,I get an "input/output error" error message. I have tried it in all of my usb ports which work for everything else. The tech support @ WD had no answers and I'm hoping someone hear can help me. Thank you so much!
Diva B. (after trying about a dozen names and they were all taken, this is what I wound up with, plz don't hold it against me :-))

USB2.0 PCI cards that use the NEC chipset seem to give the least amount of problems for Mac users.
OWC have a few different ones for sale.
http://eshop.macsales.com/Search/Search.cfm?Ntk=Primary&Ns=P_Popularity%7c1&Ne=5 000&N=7057&Ntt=USB2**0**cards
Do you also connect the external USB drive to the AC power as well while you use it ?
Sometimes USB external drive problems are resolved simply by plugging them into the mains power and trying again.
Stewie
Message was edited by: stewiesno1

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