[Madrag]

hello all,

A friend of mine brought an external USB 2 HD, and after plugging it into my G5 DP 2.0, it mounted alright, but after double-clicking on the drive, the spinning wheel starts its cycle, and it keeps going and going, etc and all I can do is force the restart on the mac's button (the finder wasn't responding)
I tried several times and the same happens...

This is with OS X 10.3.8 and the ext. HD was formatted in windows (don't know the format)

Is there a way to make it work?
is this normal (known issue)?

[Calli46]

I just bought an external USB 2.0 HD enclosure for a spare 40 GB HD I had. After installing it, I tried copying a few hundred MB folders to it and everything seemed fine. Eventually, I tried to erased a bunch of files out of it and I got too the forever spinning wheel. Even restarting the finder wouldn't give me back the control. I had to restart and if I would disconnect and reconnect the drive, it wouldn't mount on the desktop.

Then, I opened the case to check the drive closely. The Master/Slave/CableSelect jumper was set on Master. I changed it to Cable Select. After reassembly, it has been working fine since then, even DOS Fat32 formatted partition, as well as Mac HFS+ ones. By the way, I'm using 10.3.8 too.

Is your drive an external enclosure + internal IDE HD or a ready-to-use external drive (like LaCie and other) ? If it's an enclosure type like mine, maybe you could look at the drive inside to check its jumper and try another position (slave won't cut it, but try switching the jumper from master to cable select or the other way around).

[Madrag]

that's a good tip!
the drive isn't mine, and yes, it is an external enclosure with an internal IDE drive.
The next time my friend comes over, we'll try the jumper change.

thanks a lot!, I think that might do the trick!