External Firewire drive won't appear in finder

[Chris Fitzgerald]

I have an old G4800 quicksilver in my music room that only gets used for recording. I bought a LaCie 160G FW drive so that I could move a lot of the audio files (digital performer) from that computer to another machine in the house for mixing.

My problem is this: the LaCie hard drive won't show up on the G4 (OSX v 10.2.3) machine at all. In Disk Utility, it appears as an "unmounted" and "Untitled" disc, but it never appears in the finder or on the desktop. What can I try to get this going? I'd like to be able to carry this drive to a machine running Tiger eventually.

[audiopollution]

Do you have any data on the drive already or is it new out of the box?

If it's brand new, format it.

If it's not, does the drive also have a USB connection? If so, try that. (My LaCie drive has FW 400, FW800 and USB 2.0 ports.)

[Chris Fitzgerald]

It's brand new. Sorry for the newb question, but how do I format it when it doesn't appear except in disk utility? Do I need to "erase" the drive in DU?

[Mr. H]

Originally posted by Chris Fitzgerald
Do I need to "erase" the drive in DU?

Probably. You definitely need to use Disk Utility to format the drive (use HFS+ unless you want to share with Windows, in which case you should use FAT32 (which has limitations relative to HFS+)), and that's probably the way to do it.

[audiopollution]

Originally posted by Chris Fitzgerald
It's brand new. Sorry for the newb question, but how do I format it when it doesn't appear except in disk utility? Do I need to "erase" the drive in DU?

Yes, erase the disk in Disk Utility, as per the above posters instructions.