[MacDV] New hard drive won't mount

[Nick Scalise]

On May 10, 2005, at 7:03 PM, Neil Poese wrote:


> I have a problem that has never come up before, although to the  
> best of my knowledge I'm doing the same thing I always have. I'm  
> putting a 160 gig drive (Deskstar) into an ADS external firewire  
> case. The drive connects to the ribbon connector in the drive case  
> just like others always have, but it  drive won't mount, and in  
> Disk Utility it shows up as having only 128 gigs. This is on a G4  
> eMac running Jaguar 10.2.8. I get a message that says that the  
> drive needs to be initialized, but when I click OK, nothing happens.
>
> To make matters worse, the CD that ships with the drive won't mount  
> when I restart and hold down the "C" key. The specs say that the  
> drive will run on either Mac or PC, and that's always been the case  
> when I've swapped drives before.
>

Generally, firewire drives should show more than 128, but it has to  
do with 48 bit LBA <http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html? 
artnum=86178> and some may not.

I'm thinking that your firewire case may need a firmware update. If  
that does not do it, you either need to get a new case for your  
greater than 128 GB hd's or get a smaller hd for your case.

Now, here's just an experiment, cause I wouldn't trust it to data  
until you get the firmware sorted. Plugin the drive into your  
firewire port. Open DiskUtility, in DiskUtlity, click on your new  
harddrive, then you should see a tab or something labeled Erase.  
Click on that and you should be able to erase the drive and get it to  
mount.

As far as the CD goes, I'm sure that it is just a driver CD and will  
not boot your machine. But take heart, as you most likely don't even  
need the drivers.

Good luck,

--
Nick Scalise
nickscalise at mac.com