Totally fed up with external hard drive problem

Question

I purchased a 500 gb USB Mybook drive a week ago, and all it did was freeze up my mac. So everyone said to get a firewire one instead. So i got the firewire version, and it does the same thing. Immediately when it's plugged in, I get the spinning disk forever.
If I start up with it plugged in, after the login, it freezes. I called their tech support, and they have no idea either. Wonderful. I've tried every fire wire and usb port on the mac, with no discernable results.
Please help before I throw it through a window!

Answer 1

Not far from you is a dealer in Mac Firewire hard drives which should work. http://www.macsales.com/
If those don't work, then you know you have a hardware problem. Your machine may be old enough to have its clock battery replaced which can affect the ability of access to the ports. The clock battery is a 3.6V 1/2 AA lithium you can get from Radio Shack as catalog item 23-026.
If after making sure you have a current clock battery (one under 3 years old), it still doesn't work, try zapping the PRAM:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=2238
And resetting the Firewire ports:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=88338
And if you are still stuck, it suggests a truly bad hardware problem, most likely in the power supply or logicboard controller.