External hard drive errors

N

NB33

Registered
I've just bought a 160GB LaCie external disc drive for my Mac G4. It was all working fine until yesterday when I plugged in and it announced that I "had inserted disk containing no volumes Mac OS X can read" and giving me three options – to initialise, ignore or eject the disc. I initialised it, hoping that I could erase or restore the disc and start again. But when I went into Disc Utility to erase the disc, the erase function failed saying 'Disc erase failed with error. Unknown error -20'. I followed LaCie's instructions to change the pull-down box in Partition from 'current' to '1 Partition', but got the same error message.

Has anybody else had these problems – and/or know of a solution as currently I can't use the disc drive at all?

Many thanks.
 
Did you try on another Mac ? My Firewire 160 GB La Cie operates well on my iMac G4 but is not read by my G3 B&W.
 
I've tried it on both an ibook and my G4 – but have the same problem on both machines...
 
Which version of the OS are you running ? I had problems with my 160GB external drive when I upgraded to 10.3.6, there are known issues with external firewire drives with this release.

Try upgrading to 10.3.7 if you haven't already and see if that solves the problem. If you already have you can just ignore this post.
 
I've just upgraded to 10.3.7, but had no luck with that either. Every time I try to erase or partition it comes back with an error message.

Have emailed LaCie to see if they can help, but had no reply yet.

Thanks for your help.
 
It looks like the operating system was the problem after all. Just re-upgraded and was able to erase the hard drive. I've since copied files across and it all seems to be working fine – on both computers, too.

Thanks again for your help.
 
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