New External Drive won't show up on Mac

dufresne2011

I have an old eMac (OS X 10.2.8) which I love dearly and I wanted to back up a lot of (graphics and art) stuff from it onto an external drive. I bought a Hitachi SimpleDrive 500GB which is formatted by default to FAT 32 which means it should work on both Mac and PCs. It works fine on the laptop but it isn't recognised by the Mac. It shows in Disk Utility but when I go to Erase and format to 'MS-DOS File system' (as advised by some on the net as a fix) it just shows a greyed out loading bar with 'Remounting Volume' which stays there ad infinitum. I'd really like to be able to use this on the Mac and laptop.

Old Mac OS verses new external hard drive problem?

Can anyone out there help me? I would greatly appreciate any advice.

Many thanks,

Dufresne.

stimpson

10.2.x cannot recognize partitions over 128gb.

Try partitioning on the PC and create a partition of 127mb. Grab the data off the Mac and transfer to PC. Then repartition the drive back to 500gb.

dufresne2011

Thanks for your reply stimpson.

I want to be able to periodically back the stuff up (and keep it) on the external hard drive but also use the external drive on the laptop. Is there no way of doing this while keeping the storage size at 500GB (which I paid for)?

Excuse me if I'm coming across as dim. I only know so much about computers.

dave1982

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=529312

insinkerator

If you partitioned the drive into 125GB slots (roughly, allow for formatting), then you should be able to access them all through your eMac and laptop. Or am I picking something up wrong here?

muggyog

dufresne2011, you wont lose any space ( well hardly any ) by partitioning. You will just have four 125GB(~) partitions Vs one single 500GB partition. Four 'drives' versus one, you'll feel like you have MORE space!

dufresne2011

What a disaster. I tried to partition the drive on mac and just keep getting greyed out status bar ad infinitum. As a last resort I tried to partition the drive on laptop windows 7 and I (somehow) ended up deleting the drive alltogether and now when I plug it in to the laptop it asks me to format it, only the only option bar NTFS is exFAT which apparently OS X 10.2.8 won't recognise. If I put it in the Mac, neither partitioning or erasing work in Disc Utility. I'm banjaxed

stimpson

http://download.cnet.com/Easeus-Partition-Master-Home-Edition/3000-2248_4-10863346.html?tag=mncol%3bpop&cdlPid=10982635

I havent used it but this tool is a partition manager and should allow you to partition the disk. You need to set up your partitions then format them to fat32.

dufresne2011

stimpson you are a STONE GENIUS! It worked! Partitioned external drive into 4 partitions (each under 125GB) and assigned FAT32 format to all using the tool you recommended.

One last question: It takes about 5 minutes to recognise and mount the 4 drives on the Mac desktop - very slow. Is this normal? anything I can do to speed it up?

stimpson

Nice one.

I think those Macs had USB 1.1 so are bound to be a little slow on USB.

Are you planning on using the mac going forward? Might be worth setting up an Ethernet connection to transfer files.

muggyog

Was about to suggest formatting to FAT32 on PC but all is now well.

Just one point ( history lesson ). The 128GB limit is not caused by 10.2 but by the HD interface. If your eMac has a ATA66 controller it can address up to 136.9GB, to go above that you need ATA100. ATA66=ATA5, ATA100=ATA6.

Glad that's all sorted!

BTW If its this one, its got Firewire 400 also.