[G4] Mass storage problem

[Ron Steinke]

On Jul 11, 2004, at 11:15 AM, hachapitees at lightspeed.net wrote:

<He hooked up a external hard drive (USB) to his desktop G4 to copy 
some files over to his G4 laptop. The drive shows up fine on the G4 
desktop, which is running 9.04.
When we hooked it up to the Powerbook, which is running 9.1, the disk 
is a no show.>

Did you simply move the external drive to the laptop and use the same 
USB cable? It IS possible that you have a damaged cable. Did you try 
other cables yet?

<I tried to install the Apple 1.3.5 Mass Storage extension, but it said 
it wasn't needed on this machine.  The drive is an AcomData, and we 
installed the software that came with it on the Powerbook, but still no 
go.>

As long as you are using OS 9+, you should not have had to add any 
other software. The machines and OSes that you list are capable of 
using USB without any added help. You may have created a conflict when 
you installed the new software. The laptop may not "know" which 
software to use and therefore simply stop trying to recognize the USB 
device. Have you tried connecting any other device to the laptop to 
determine whether it is ONLY the external drive that isn't working?

I suggest removing the new software and trying again with only the 
original OS software installed. You may have to do a re-install to get 
the USB functionality back if it has been corrupted in any way.

Happy hunting.