External Firewire drive won't appear in finder

chris fitzgeraldchris fitzgerald
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
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.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 4
    audiopollutionaudiopollution Posts: 3,226member
    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.)
  • Reply 2 of 4
    chris fitzgeraldchris fitzgerald Posts: 88member
    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?
  • Reply 3 of 4
    mr. hmr. h Posts: 4,870member
    Quote:

    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.
  • Reply 4 of 4
    audiopollutionaudiopollution Posts: 3,226member
    Quote:

    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.
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