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TICKET ARCHIVE -> Western Digital Drive In Enclosure

macaddict2 - Jun 18, 2005 - 10:56 pm

Hi,

I bought a Nexar 2 enclosure, and a 80gb internal hardrive.
I inserted the drive into the enclosure and connected it to my Imac G4 running Panther.

A message comes up saying, you have inserted a disk with volume mac osx cannot read, then a choice of initialize, ignore, or eject.

When I pick initialize, disk utility lunches and it sees the western digital , drive but it will not let me mount it, or do anything to it.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

skapp - Jun 18, 2005 - 11:32 pm

If the drive appears in Disk Utility's leftside list, then select the drive entry which is the one with the mfgrs. ID and size. Click on the Partition tab in the DU main window. Select one or more partitions from the dropdown menu (if you just want to format the entire drive, then select one partition), set the format type to Mac OS Extended (HFS+), name your volume, then click on the Partition button. When the new volume mounts on the Desktop, select the volume from the leftside list (this will be the sub-entry under the drive entry), click on the Erase tab in the DU main window, set the format type to Mac OS Extended in the dropdown menu, then click on the Erase button. When the volume reappears on the Desktop the drive is ready for use. Quit Disk Utility.

macaddict2 - Jun 19, 2005 - 1:24 am

Thank you so much. I spent hours and hours researching this,

and I did exactly as you said, and now I can see the disk and acess it on my desktop.

If I want to copy files to it, can I just use drag and drop from my Mac HD??

Again thank you so much.

Margaret

skapp - Jun 19, 2005 - 2:51 am

Yes, you can copy files by drag and drop. However, if you want to make a backup of your hard drive, then you need to do that in a particular way if you want the backup to be bootable. The easiest way to do this is to use Disk Utility. Open DU and select your startup volume from the leftside list. Click on the Restore tab in the DU main window. Drag the startup volume from the list to the Source entry. Then drag the external volume to the Destination entry. Click on the Restore button. Go have a long cup of coffee because this will take a considerable amount of time depending upon the size of the startup volume.

When the copy is completed you will have a fully bootable clone on the external drive that will also boot the computer. You can use backup software like LaCie SilverKeeper, SuperDuper, Synchronize! Pro X, etc. to maintain incremental backups and maintain bootability of the clone.