[madcre8r]

i just got a mac book pro today. intel core 2 duo, 2.16 ghz, 2gb ram. 160gb. i tried loading information from an external drive only to find out that the was not showing up on the desktop like normal. i had been troubleshooting this issue all day and tried everything i could think of and i am now turning to you for help. so here are the details.

the drive: seagate external 300gb 3.5 usb/ firewire combo drive. formatted to NTFS.
the computer in question: mac book pro 2.16 ghz
other computers invloved in troubleshooting: dell inspiron 710m, iMac intel, ibook g4, and my roommate's mac book pro 2.16 ghz.
the problem: external drive not being recognized on my mac book pro when plugged into either usb port. not mounting not showing up in disk utility. also not showing in system profiler under usb ports.
however, this axact same drive shows up all on the other computers involved including my roommate's mac book pro. so the format is not the issue. also, the drive DOES show on my mac book when plugged in the firewire port. so it's not the drive and this computer. the usb ports work just fine with my mouse and two other different drives. one of them also formatted in NTFS. so the ports aren't the issue.
also, after i plug the drive into my mac book pro and wait for it to mount ( and nothing happens), i eventually disconnected it form the mac book and then plugged into my PC. only directly after i do this does my pc consider the drive an unknown usb device. however if i power down the drive and turn it back on the same pc then recognizes it. very confusing. and i am stumped.

any help is very appreciated. thanks in advance.

[SierraDragon]

Interesting; I suggest Apple tech support should be consulted. However, one simple solution is use FW, not USB. USB sucks as a mass storage connection method, inferior to FW.

-Allen Wicks

[brother337]

I think I've had this issue as well with an external drive, but it wasn't a big deal since I tend to use firewire.

I think I did get around it once by reformatting the drive to Mac HFS, but this probably isn't an option since you're swapping the drive between macs and PCs.

Either way, I'm with SierraDragon. I almost always use the firewire option when connecting an external drive to one of my macs.

[brassplayersrock²]

funny. same thing happened to me last night. i have mine daisy chained by firewire with a an external disk drive, and all of a sudden, the dang icon just didnt show up yet i was still able to access my photos and itunes content (which are on the external) so i knew it wasnt the firewire connection. turns out that part of the external disk drives power had come undone (two part power unit, brick and then a separate plug) i put that back together and ya know what? a second or so later the external hds icon came up. maybe some kind of power situation you are having??

-a

heh, why didnt think of this? umm, not to make you seem stupid, but do you happen to have show hard drives unchecked or checked under general finder preferences on your computer??

[madcre8r]

FIXED!!!!!

if anyone else encounters this issue, here is what helped......

i read somwhere an another forum that it might help to let the capacitors in the usb ports die and and reset themselves. so i took out my battery for about 30 minutes to remove all power. waited and tried again after and it worked!!!. apparently this is a known issue with usb and firewire ports and all types of devices.

as for usb, i myself also prefer firewire, but since i use it on several computers, it's easier to just keep one cable connected all the time and the pc only has a firewire 4 pin, so it's far more convenient to keep it all connected via usb.

btw, apple phone support was a joke. the girl had to put me on hold four times at about 3 minutes each time only to come back and ask me questions like " um... ok.... it is on?"

[brassplayersrock²]

sorry to hear about you bad apple call. i personally only have had good experiences with them. interesting to know about the power drain thing. thank you

-a

[wilsonng]

I believe MacOS X Tiger has support to only read NTFS formatted drives. They can't write to it. MacOS X Tiger can write to FAT32 formatted drives.

That's interesting... I have an external Firewire/USB2 16x DVD burner. I can read optical discs via Firewire and USB2 but I can only get reliable burns when I connect it to USB2. Burning to the external burner via FireWire always causes a bad burn....

[madcre8r]

yes. tiger can only read an NTFS drive. not write to it. which is exactly all i need. i had a very long talk with seagate tech support a while back where i learned that drives formatted to FAT32 and swapped between pc's and macs are expected to fail at some point and that they will eventually result in data loss ( which i experienced). so for my needs, this is a perfect set up.

[seanc]

MacFUSE should be able to write to NTFS partitions, although I've never tried it.