External HD - 10.4 File System?

B

brh

Registered
Hello,
I'm not quite sure yet if this is a hardware problem, or a file system problem. I have been serving up iTunes to a Roku Soundbridge for a while now from a G5 tower running 10.4. The iTunes library is on an external HD (300GB Seagate in an ADS enclosure) over USB.

Recently I bought a blue & white G3 to use as a dedicated iTunes server. I have freshly installed 10.3 on the G3 (did not install 10.4, as the G3 does not have a DVD-ROM drive, and 10.3 seemed quite suitable). When I plug the HD up to the G3, I get an error message saying that a drive has been inserted with no readable partitions. So, the OS recognizes that I am plugging in a drive, yet it cannot read it. Additionally, if I plug in another HD that I use for backup and transfer, that has an HFS+ partition and a FAT32 partition, the FAT partition mounts, but the HFS will not.

All of that leads me to believe that the USB part of the equation is working fine, but something is amiss with the file system. Was anything changed in the file system from 10.3 to 10.4 that would make a drive formatted in 10.4 unreadable on a machine running 10.3? If this is the case, I have enough room on my G5 to dump the contents of the external and reformat it from the G3, but did not want to try this blindly, as it will take a bit of time. If this is not the case, does anyone have any other ideas or suggestions? I have not been able to find any information on the internet that seems to apply to my problem at all, sadly enough...

Thanks for any help,
Brian
 
Generally not, there shouldn't be a difference. However: The G3 probably doesn't have USB-2, so the harddrive would be veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery slow, anyway. Are you sure you want to use it that way? (I know I'm not helpful right now, but I have no idea what could be the cause. Even with USB 1.1 the HFS+ volumes should mount with not a problem except speed.)
 
Yeah, I've been experimenting with iTunes off of the one USB HD that I can mount (the FAT32 part on my backup drive)... Although some things seem to be a little bit weird right now (some file names seem to have been corrupted somewhere along the way...) I am able to serve up a 70mb .wav file to my SoundBridge without any rebuffering or other issues... So while a firewire enclosure might be a wise investment in the not-so-distant future, it doesn't seem like the highest priority right now..

I still can't get my HFS+ drives to mount, however... What has crossed my mind is that either
a, there is an issue with large external USB drives on older hardware like this?
b, there is an issue with large drives on a G3 in general? i have read about size limitations, but thought that a drive connected over USB would be excluded..?
c, the possibility is still in my head that there's a file system issue, although that makes little sense to me as well..

None of these seem all that probable, but I can't think of anything else! Any further help/ideas would be greatly appreciated.. there wouldn't be any reason why USB1.1 would be too slow for the machine to even recognize an HFS+ drive or anything, would there?

thanks - brian
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top