External USB 2.0 Drive Issues...

B

bchase

Registered
Hey guys, my external USB drive is giving me issues. It's a maxtor 120 Gig in an external case.. it was formatted as NTFS because I was an avid PC user. I converted my drive to FAT32 with Partition Magic, everything went smooth as can be. The drive picks up, take a few mins to mount, but shows none the less, but then after about 5 mins of use, it locks up the finder and I need to unplug the drive to continue work. It's a real pain in the ass when you are trying to do work.

I love my Powerbook, but this is bugging me. Are there any suggestions you have? I have heard Apple is releasing a seed that fixes the NTFS support, but have not heard since. Obviously, NTFS is a better file system than FAT32, but I need to keep a format that reads on both Windows and OSX platforms. Any help would be appriciated, thanks guys!

-Brandon
 
"It is only possible to read FAT and FAT32 formatted drives in a Macintosh. Do not use NTFS formatted drives in a Macintosh computer."

"Warning: NTFS formatted drives cannot be used in a Macintosh (except as read-only with Mac OS X 10.,3 as noted above). If you attempt to use a NTFS formatted disk, upon starting up the Mac OS will prompt you to format the drive. Do not format the drive, doing so will erase the contents of the drive. If you have an NTFS formatted disk, you must use another method to transfer the data from the PC to the Macintosh."

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=75320
 
Yes, and the Mac may not like the somewhat 'jiggly' change that Partition Magic does when changing partition format form NTFS to FAT32. Works OK with most PCs, but I would call this a 'pasted-on' format, and may be the reason that your Mac is so 'nervous'
I would recommend the following 3 steps: Connect the hard drive to a PC, and remove ALL partition information, probably with a Debug script. Then do an fdisk to create a fresh FAT32 partition, and then a good format (That's a 3-step process)
 
Still locks up on me after a full re-format. I also read recently that the new updated released by apple supports NTFS. A friend of mine says it works great on his mac, on mine I can't get it to read what so ever. I tried 3 NTFS drives. The FAT32 still locks up though... im clueless on where to go from here. Any help would be appriciated.
 
A 'full re-format' won't help at all, if you don't delete the partition that the volume exists on. 1. debug (if needed); 2. partition; then, 3. format

Does your PowerBook have USB 2.0 ports? If not, perhaps that's the main problem. (your big USB hard drive would be WAY slow on a USB 1.1 port)
 
DeltaMac's got a good point, there -- if your PowerBook is an older model, you may have only USB 1.1. USB 1.1 tends to be a processor hog when you use hard drives on it, so the "locking up" may not be locking up at all -- does the drive have a diagnostic (or read/write) light on it? If so, try it again on the computer, and see during one of these lockup periods if the read/write light is blinking or showing activity...

It's a shot in the dark, I know...
 
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