Weird problem involving my external hard drive - help please!

I recently got a formac mini 120 gb firewire hard drive, which had been working fine with my g4 quicksliver.
i then went to a friends (g5 machine) with my drive and he put some data on it - bought it back to mine and managed to re connect the drive and take the data - no problem - very happy.
I recently gave my drive to another friend using a g5 and when it came back, nothing - i don't get the drive symbol appearing. turned the comp on and off many times and tried re-connecting etc still no drive appearing.
Then i took the drive to my friend with a mac lap top power book. connected there - working fine. Baffling. was happy that my data can still be accessed.
I know it's not the firewire cable because i can get power to the drive - i can see the red light at the fron on.
Can anyone help with this weird problem?
Thanks

Thought you could use this info about getting FireWire to work!
First, you should always Repair Permissions in Disk Utility before and after any update; I would do that now. If you installed your update with FireWire plugged in, your Mac may not recognize it anymore.
Try resetting your FireWire ports by disconnecting all FW devices, shut down your Mac and unplug it from AC power (wall socket) for 30 minutes. plug it back in and try FW.
If that did'nt work, download the combo update from this site (yours may be corrupt), not Software Update, disconnect all firewire + USB devices except keyboard + mouse, Repair Permissions, re-install update, Repair Permissions again + try. Yours might be the 10.4.10 Combo update. I have no idea since you did not fill out your specs. fully when you signed in to this site. Others reading, download the Combo that applies to your system. This link is for PPC Macs not Intel Macs.
If that still did'nt get it Zap the PRAM. While restarting Mac hold down the following key combo Command-Option-P-R. Keep holding those keys down till you hear the second start-up chime, then release.
For those of you with Macs that are not PowerBooks or iBooks, a bad internal battery can cause FireWire to not be recognized, so make sure it's good! Also, here is Apple doc.#88338 on getting FireWire to work.
Good Luck!
Cheers!
DALE

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OS is Mountain Lion, upgraded no problems, used an external Hard drive for my time machine, now my iPhoto will not show any of my photo's or ay new ones I import! Help please!!

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Do you get this window when you hold down the Command+Option keys and launch iPhoto?
If not then you're not holding down both keys long enough.
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If you want to just extract the playlists from your iPod, plug it in iTunes. When it appears under devices, right->click on it and choose Export Playlists. Save them to a location such as your desktop and them import them into your library once you have copied and imported all of your music back into it.
See this older post from another forum member Zevoneer covering the different methods and software available to assist you with the task of copying content from your iPod back to your PC and into iTunes.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2452022?start=0&tstart=0
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HELP - problems setting up External Hard Drive to Time machine

Hi
I set up Time Machine about a month ago. I had an additional 250GB USB External Hard Drive connected but it was not included in the back up. I think that at the time I had been told that I could add the files from the 250GB external to the back-up Time Machine disk later.
Also, before I set up Time Machine on the new 1TB USB drive, I partitioned the drive, and I think as I was deciding how to partition it, I used the Erase utility to reset the drive. I don't know if that is relevant.
Time Machine has been working fine with my internal drive - well I haven't needed to restore anything with it, so I don't really know.
However, I have tried to add the 250GB drive to Time Machine, and in Preferences->Options, the 250GB drive is greyed out in the 'Do no back up' list. And the - (minus) box is also greyed out so nothing happens when clicking on it.
I tried to sort this out a couple of weeks ago, and someone helpful on the forum advised me:
"to move the file /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist to the desktop. then go to system preferences->Time machine and set up time machine again. the exclusion list will be empty and you can add what you want to it. "
I tried this a number of times and each time I struggled to set it up again. When moving the .plist file I was always asked whether to keep or replace. I tried both, sometimes the file would come back into the folder, sometimes not.
The 250 GB drive was still on the list of 'Do Not Back Up the following drives". After one occasion recently on my attempts, the system did not recognize time machine.
I'm really stuck here - both my drives are ridiculously low in space.
Please help,
Thanks
Steve

What is it you are trying to do? Do you want to change the backup drive from the one you have been using to another drive? That's all you can do. If you have a drive set up as the TM backup drive, you cannot designate another drive as the backup drive unless you disable the existing backup drive. TM cannot backup to more than one drive at a time, and TM cannot span backups across multiple drives.
To move any device out of the Exclude list simply select it then click on the [-] button to remove it from the list.
To prepare a new drive as the backup drive you must partition the drive GUID or APM depending upon whether your computer is Intel or PPC, respectively, and the formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) See the following:
Extended Hard Drive Preparation
1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder. If you need to reformat your startup volume, then you must boot from your OS X Installer Disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Installer menu (Utilities menu for Tiger or Leopard.)
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Set the number of partitions from the dropdown menu (use 1 partition unless you wish to make more.) Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID (only required for Intel Macs) then click on the OK button. Click on the Partition button and wait until the volume(s) mount on the Desktop.
4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.
5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.
6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.
Steps 4-6 are optional but should be used on a drive that has never been formatted before, if the format type is not Mac OS Extended, if the partition scheme has been changed, or if a different operating system (not OS X) has been installed on the drive.

Problem with firewire external hard drives.

Hey, I'm new (not to Apple just to these forums) and I find this section very helpful.
Anyways, I have a very... odd situation. I just got my new Macbook Pro today, and I've had a 12" Powerbook G4 since it first came out. Alright, with that out of the way, here is the problem. I have 2 external hard drives, both being a Western Digital. Now, I hook up this Macbook up to HD "A" and it works. I hook up the Powerbook up to the same HD and it fails to recognize it.
Here is where it gets weird. I hook this Macbook up to HD "B" and it fails to recognize it. I hook up the Powerbook to it, and it recognizes it. Any idea as to why this might be? I was thinking maybe because my Macbook is on a 35% charge right now. Then again, my Powerbook's battery doesn't last 5 minutes and the charger for it is away from both HD's and it still works for "B".
If you can help, thanks much. I have searched, but to no avail have I found the same problem that is occurring with me at this time.

Check in system profiler under FireWire when both, one after the other, FW-HDD are connected - just to verify it is a technical problem - if no info (effect) -> hardware, if you see any information like this:
1394 USB COMBO:
Manufacturer: 337 COMBO
Model: 0x8034
GUID: 0x1A3500002828D
Maximum Speed: Up to 400 Mb/sec
Connection Speed: Up to 400 Mb/sec
Sub-units:
1394 USB COMBO Unit:
Unit Software Version: 0x10483
Unit Spec ID: 0x609E
Firmware Revision: 0x0
Product Revision Level: 0.01
Sub-units:
1394 USB COMBO SBP-LUN:
Capacity: 111.82 GB
Removable Media: Yes
BSD Name: disk2
Mac OS 9 Drivers: No
Partition Map Type: APM (Apple Partition Map)
S.M.A.R.T. status: Not Supported
your problem has a different background...
Dont use any software on your hdd until your not 100% sure there is no other way...
c.

HT5958 We are 4 min in to editing a video on final cut pro. now my computer is freezing up. I have heard that this is a glitch from downloading. (beyond frustrated) is this from working from 2 external hard drives? PLEASE HELP! =)

PLEASE HELP. =)
we are about 4 minutes into editing a video for the first time on final cut pro x 10.1. everything was going very smoothly, but then it started freezing up. I had to do a hard reset and took it into the computer store that actually installed final cut for us. they suggested that our mac actually is not capable of keeping up with final cut. (I FIND THIS HARD TO BELIEVE!!) We work on an IMAC 2.66 ghz intel core 2 duo. 8 gb 1067 mhz ddr3. software os x 10.9.1 (hopefully that info will help for your suggestions) Because we have soooooooooooo many hours of high def video, we are working off of two external hard drives.... is this a problem?? or do we really need to upgrade our computer?????

Like Russ said, check Activity Monitor and see what else is running and turn off any Applications that aren't needed.
Turn off wi-fi or disconnect the wire that goes to the Internet
Turn off Background Rendering (if you see an orange line on the top of the time line that moves along and gets shorter while you're not doing anything that is a good sign that Background Rendering is running.
I haven't used 10.1 yest but on the previous version there was a small circle approximately in the middle of the screen, about 1/2-inch or 1 cm in diameter, and it would have a number inside. The number is the percent complete of what is hapening. When it is Rendering the percentage will be shown.
Basically, you probably need to free up resources.
For what it is worth, my previous Mac Pro was a 1,1 2.66 machine, also with 8GB of, I think, 667 memory, and it would process FCPX 10.0.9 okay. It did have an upgraded video card, though.

Problems with iomega External Hard Drive on MacBook Air

Hi community!
I'm experiencing some problems with my MacBook Air and an external hard drive and I'm wondering if anybody would be able to help me out.
I own a MacBook Air running Mac OS X 10.7.3. When I connect my iomega 500GB external hard drive, the Finder is able to pick it up, but when I click on the drive name, it spins forever without the Finder responding for a long time (it basically crashes the Finder with a spinning ball staying forever). The light on the external hard drive flashes intermittently when I first plug it in, but after that stays constantly lit. So I guess the disk has power, but something else is wrong with it.
It was working fine earlier today but I accidentally pulled the cable out while the disk was working. I'm hoping this hasn't permanently damaged my drive.
Any help on what I could do to fix this issue would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
SV

You might try launching Disk Utility, and then select the drive in question to run a "Verify disk" on the drive. This may indicate any errors in the file system of the drive that might be preventing the successful reading of the disk.
If the disk is empty, you may want to re-partition and reformat, so as to start with a "clean slate".

Desperate need of External Hard drive help.

Bottom line, I need one that will work. I have been through a mess of external HD problems & I have looked at hundreds of drives on many sites & I just don't know which one I can trust. I have tried a few already, but they just didn't like working on a Mac (even though they are Mac recommended). If anyone can offer any kind of help, it would be greatly, greatly, greatly appreciated. Of course, we won't know how appreciative I am until it arrives & it actually works.
Here is what I am looking for. About 120GB capacity. Nothing over $110, but I am a little flexible. It will just be sitting on my desk, so it doesn't need to be ultra portable. I do not want to buy a regular hard drive & stick it in a case, it's what I have now & it has caused me so many problems. I have FireWave surround sound, so it would be nice if it was firewire (plugs into the back of the FireWave, which is tucked away, while the drive sits on the desk). Would prefer it not to be bus-powered, less cables coming out of my laptop, the better.
I have been through a lot with these products & it just seems like there isn't a great external hard drive that was meant for the MacBook Pro. Please, help me if you can. I need one very soon, the external I have now (the one in a case) is all screwed up & I can only access files when doing a data recovery, but I need another external to transfer the files onto, (I have very little space left on my internal). Thank you very much.

If your looking for something that looks great, works great, and is highly recommended, then I would suggest you look at a drive by G-Technologies. I have been using their drives for years and I have yet to have any issues at all. They do use a variety of drives in the cases, but their boards are what are great. They always receive at least 4 mice, if not 5 from MacWorld as well.
You might be a little hard pressed to get a drive right in your price range, but a smaller drive, such as the one your looking for, are a little harder to find unless they are 2.5" drives. Everything these days is getting bigger.
http://www.g-technology.com/Products/G-DRIVE.cfm
Oh, I should also note that their drives come with a 2 year warranty as well.

External Hard Drive Help (Western Digital vs. My Mac)

Im not quite sure where to post this information so i chose here. Im sorry if its the wrong place.
Anyway, I have a first generation Mac Book Pro, and as you may know it has a tendency to have to go to the shop often to get the logic board and fans fixed. Because of this i don't want to risk loosing my important data so i purchased a western digital 320 gb external hard drive.
The problem is, when i went to use DiskUtility, it started copying but then said such a device didn't exist and that there was an error. I am still unfamilar with Disk Utility, so could anyone help me by giving me directon on how to not only back up my hard drive but also how to place extra files from my computer on there. thanks!
Cheers!

OK… firstly try the USB port on the other side and see if it makes any difference. Otherwise, do you have any better luck using the drive when it's connected through an AC powered USB hub.
To check if your MBP is seeing your drive at all it should appear in the USB section in the System Profiler utility.

Password problem booting from external hard drive

I have an eMac and just installed Leopard. BUT now I can't use Photoshop and Quark from within Classic because it's not available with Leopard. I've installed my old 10.3 OS on my external hard drive, and when I boot up from that (using the Option key), after I choose the hard drive as the startup disc, I am asked for my admin password. When I type that in, the dialog box jiggles from side to side for a moment and blanks out the password, asking for it again.
How can I boot up 10.3 from the external hard drive? Help -- I need to use the Classic environment for a job! Thanks for any help --

Hi, Jeff --
Well, I think my problem is finally solved, thanks (partly) to your help. Just to help other folks who have this problem, I'm going to state briefly how I fixed it:
-- I did an Erase and Install on the Seagate AFTER spending all day burning 30 CDs with the archived files I'd taken off the Mac but didn't want to lose.
-- After that, I could indeed boot up the Mac from the Seagate in 10.3 and all seemed fine.
-- But I made the mistake of doing a full backup to the Seagate from the Mac (which took two hours).
-- After that, I couldn't boot up the Seagate at all -- I spent two 20-minute periods waiting for it to get off the gray screen with the Apple log, to no avail. A friend of mine suggested that the backup program might be the problem.
-- After some trepidation but knowing that I already had everything I needed on those 30 CDs, I decided to experiment and partition the Seagate (via Disc Utility) into one partition with only the 10.3 install on it and the other with whatever files I needed, including the applications I needed to open in 10.3.
-- That worked!! I can now boot up the Seagate "10.3 drive" and access all the files and applications I need from the Seagate "Backup Drive."
I hope this information helps someone else in the same predicament.
Thanks for all your help and patience; your suggestion to do an Erase and Install was the right move to get me started.
Eileen

Restoring using an external hard drive help

Ok so.. ive recnelty received my mac back from apple, after javing the hd replaced. To prevent the loss of all of my stuff i bought an external hd and used this as my time machine backup, so now its all on my external hard drive. The problem ive got is that ive got no idea how to restore my mac using the extermal hard drive so its like it was before it was sent off. ive been told one option is to launch my mac in recovery mode and choose to restore using. my external hard drive there. however i cant access recovery mode because i have a wireless keyboard, and the only wired keyboard i have is a windows one. also, to make matters worse, i cant use any discs because my optical drive is broken, so until i receive my extermal one, discs are also out. of the option.
any other ways to do it?
thanks!

RomeoVersace wrote:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4889?viewlocale=en_US
Try this, your going to be using a program called Migration Assistant to restore data from a different computer's Time Machine. Your computer is a different computer now because of the new Hard Drive, so instead of entirely recovering the Operating System, this will save time and data by allowing you to choose individually what you want to restore and what you don't want to.
Do not use Migration Assistant, instead you will use Setup Assistant (which starts automatically when you first start your Mac) if you already started you Mac and added a user then you will have to use MA, but you will need to remove a user afterwards.

How do I move my iTunes Music to an external hard drive? Please help!

I bought an external hard drive and moved the iTunes Music folder from my local hard drive to the external hard drive and now the iTunes library appears empty. I moved all my music back into the local hard drive and the libarary is now full full of music again. How can I move all the files to the external drive and have iTunes retrieve the music from there?
Thanks!
Paula

This article tells you the proper way to move your music:
iTunes: Moving your iTunes Music folder
After a successful move, always connect your external disk, before running iTunes.
Failing to do so will iTunes cause to reset the 'iTunes Music folder location'.
That means your next ripped CDs will be stored on your internal disk.
If that happens, just set the proper location again in the preferences.
Hope this helps.
M
17' iMac fp 800 MHz 768 MB RAM Mac OS X (10.4.6) Several ext. HD (backup and data)

Problems getting an external hard drive to work on the new Airport Extreme

I have spent hours trying to get my 320GB external hard drive to work with the new airport extreme 802.11N. I have spent hours pouring over all of the posts here discussing possible solutions, all of which have not worked. This morning, however, I gave it another try and FINALLY, I have it working. I tried something simple. Here it is:
Using the Apple Disk Utility Program, I formated my drive using the MS-DOS mode, called my Hard drive "ItunesHD". It took about 20 minutes to complete (i'm assuming because of the size of the drive). I then unplugged the router and hard drive, turned on the hard drive, then the router. After my macbook pro reconnected, I clicked on the iDisk utility icon in my menu bar, provided my password and FINALLY saw the network drive icon on my desktop!!! It seems that formatting my drive using MS-DOS compatibility mode finally worked for me. I'm not saying this will work for anyone else who is having this problem, but you can at least try it. I tried all of the MAC formatting options and have had no luck.
What I would like to know now is (..if anyone has these answers, please let me know):
1. What is the maximum SINGLE drive capacity that this router will understand...500GB, 1TB, 2TB? I would like to get the biggest bang for my buck.
2. Keeping #1 one in mind, I purchased an Apple TV (still waiting on it to arrive) and I would like to know if it will read multiple hard drives connected to the Airport Extreme router (...say (2) 500GB hard drives). I know you can have multiple libraries in iTunes (which to me is a cheesy solutions, there should be an option in the preferences that would allow you to save your music in one place and your movies in another). Anybody have any idea on this one?
I basically want to rip all of my dvd movies on a big hard drive connected to my airport extreme to use with my AppleTV , so I just need to find out about the maximum size and hooking up more than one hard drive and getting the AppleTV to recognize them all.
thnks
MacBook Pro Core Duo Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Sorry you had so much trouble hooking up a hard drive to the base station. I've done some experimenting with the feature and this is what I've found out.
You can use either the native Mac format, Mac OS Extended, or the Microsoft format known as FAT. Apple calls FAT, MS-DOS File System in Disk Utility.
If you use Mac OS Extended, the Macs on the network will be able to connect to the drive using the native AFP (Apple File Protocol) or the Microsoft native SMB (Server Message Block) protocol. PCs will only use the SMB protocol of course.
If you use MS-DOS File System both the Macs and the PCs will only use SMB to connect to the drive over the network.
Basically I've found everything works as expected with regard to volumes connected to a network.
One thing I don't have installed is the iDisk Utility. I'm wondering if it may be the cause of the problems you were having. But reading through your post it may also be the difference between expected behaviour and the proper procedure for discovering and mounting network volumes. Let me explain.
You only mention having trouble getting the drive to show up on your Desktop, you didn't describe how you went about discovering the network drive. It isn't just suppose to show up on your desktop when you plug it in to the Extreme base station. It doesn't work like the iDisk or disks connected directly to your computer using USB/Firewire.
Normally with network drives you're suppose to either browse for them using the Network icon in the Finder or using the Connect to Server command in the Finder's Go menu, you would type the address in directly for the network volume you want to mount. Try it and see what happens.
Now to answer your other questions.
I don't have a volume large enough to hit any limits the base station may have but I did read a post about someone who said they had a 1.5 TB volume connected and could only see 1 TB of it. They were forced to partition the drive to see all available space and of course the volumes showed up as two separate drives. One thing wasn't made clear though. They didn't say what volume format they were using to format the drive, Mac OS Extended or MS-DOS.
Everything having to do with the AppleTV is just speculation at this point since no one has one yet but from what has been demonstrated so far, AppleTV relies on iTunes. In other words, it won't pull data from network volumes on its own, a computer running iTunes needs to feed it.

Problem; itunes and external hard drive

I saved my musics to my external hard drive and imported them to my itunes library, and tried to modify their tags, but everything in info section was inactive and couldn't be modified. but once i move the file to internal drive, it works fine no matter where it is stored afterwards. what's the problem here? I've already tried deselecting the read-only attribute.

You would have to change the tags while working inside the external drive. Then when you look at them through iTunes you will see the changes that you made.

Can't copy files to an external hard-drive - help??

Hi all,
My problem originally stems from the never-ending issue of using external hard-drives with a Mac (this is a huge downside to owning a Mac by the way, so if TPTB are reading this they need to fix it!). My Toshiba hard-drive was being used as my Time Machine, until a few months ago when it stopped being recognised by my Mac. Because it doesn't show up in Finder or Disc Utility when I plug it in (even though the lights are on and I can hear the power running in it), I haven't been able to re-format it to make it useable again (assuming that would work). So I basically have a £80+ tea cup holder.....
Because of this, I decided this week to use my WD hard-drive to manually back up some files on my computer, since Time Machine hasn't been able to run since March. However, when I copy the files I want to move over, "Paste" is not showing up as an option on my WD drive (it's greyed out). I can't drag and drop the files as I get the circle with a line through it when I try, and I don't want to anyway as I don't want the files removed from my computer.
Can someone advise me on what to do? The WD drive is showing up, and it has space to accept these files, so if I can get the paste option to work we'd be ready to rock and roll! One of the folders I want to copy is my Music folder, and given it's size I know this will take hours to do, but it should be showing the paste option, shouldn't it? I'm running a Macbook Pro that's less than a year old, and all the software bits are up to date.
(Of course, if Apple would fix the stupid hard-drive issue then I wouldn't be having any of the problems..... GRRRRRR!)
Thanks in advance,
Millie

Click on it, choose Get Info from the File menu, and check the format.
If it's formatted as NTFS, reformat it as MS-DOS, exFAT, or Mac OS Extended (Journaled) as desired, or install software such as Paragon NTFS on the computer.
If it's formatted as FAT32 or exFAT, use the Disk Utility's Repair Disk command on it; this may also happen for a flash drive which is about to fail.
If it's formatted as Mac OS Extended, click Authenticate and provide your administrator password, or change the permissions on that specific folder in its Get Info window.
(109318)

Weird problem involving my external hard drive - help please!

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