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TICKET ARCHIVE -> External hard drive is not detected

Dish - Jan 19, 2008 - 8:55 am

Hi there,

I have a 80GB firelight External Hard Drive (firewire). on other macs
i can read it normally. However, if i plug it in my mac,
nothing appears at all. I went into Disk Utility and my external hard disk was not
there. I have restored permissions.

This happened about a year ago after a system/software update.
I think it might have something to do with updating the firewire firmware - but I cant find the correct download - or not sure if this is the correct thing to do?
It says unknown device in the system profiler/firewire bus.

I have a g5 imac osx . 10,4,11

Any help? much appreciated
Thank

Dish

zo219 - Jan 20, 2008 - 6:00 pm

I just wrote this to someone else:

"Know that this happens, FireWire disks "disappear" sometimes. There's a procedure on Apple Support, I recall it helped mine appear.

Look in System Profiler, sometimes it's mounted but the icon has gone invisible, I don't know why. If you see it there, anyway, be encouraged.

Check and see if Disk Utility sees it - if so, and you might want to make your invisibles visible and repair the icon. For the time being, anyway, under Finder Preferences, check Hard Disks Show on Desktop.

Good luck, it's there, it will show up."

( p.s. Firewire doesn't have firmware.)

Dish - Jan 21, 2008 - 3:39 pm

Hi
Something quiet weird happened, yesterday after being attached to the machine for a day it just turned up!? was suddenly visible.

Took it out this morning and plugged it in again now it is invisible again!?

In system profiler it say no information is available. altho yesterday it said fire lite, and one point said unknown device.....

I have checked in disk utility and its still not there-
How do you make invisibles visible?

I checked with apple and could not find any support?

I know its there somewhere!

Thanks for the response

zo219 - Jan 21, 2008 - 4:37 pm

Okay, what you want to look for is the Apple procedure for unrecognized FireWire Disk. Go to Apple Support - I believe there's a fairly recent Tech Doc.

There are any number of utilities on MacUpdate or Versiontracker.com that have a number of useful functions. And I just saw another little freeebie for making files visible.invisible. Either of those are good places to get acquainted with.