Firewire Harddrive Weirdness

R

RatsPaw

Registered
I've got a Pyro firewire enclosure that I've been using with a Toshiba DVD-Rom drive, but I just swapped that out with an 80 GB WD 7200 RPM hard drive. OS X is reporting the drive as a 128 GB ADS drive (ADS, I guess, because the enclosure is by ADS Tech.). The problem is that Disk Utility will let me set it up as a single 128 GB partition, but it will not mount. If I set it up as 2 partitions, I get one 64 GB volume to mount, the other one will not. If I set it up as 3 partitions, nothing will mount, if I set it up as 4 partitions, then 2 32 GB volumes will mount.

The packaging and the sticker on the drive itself says that it is 80 GB, I'm wondering if there is something screwed up with the circuit board on the harddrive that is telling my machine that it's 128 GB when it's really not, or if my enclosure is confused. If I got a 128 GB drive for an 80 GB price, that's great, but it's not so great if I can only actually use 64 GB of the drive and wonder about its stability.

I've got the jumper set up for a single drive (which actually means not using the jumper at all).

If I set it up as a single (unmountable) partition in OS X, then reboot in 9, it will ask me if I want to initialize the disk, but when I say yes, it immediately fails, and 9's Drive Setup won't touch the firewire drive, saying that it is unsupported.

I'm thinking about just taking the drive back and getting a different one, but I thought I'd ask around here first.

As far as I know, I'm using the the latest firmware, and I'm on 10.2.4.

Thanks,

Rat

iBook 800 mHz combo
 
Well, pretty obviously you're not gonna get 128 GB out of an 80 GB hard drive. If you want to see if it's the drive, you could connect it internally. You might even try doing that, formatting it that way, then putting it back in the drive kit - it may work fine then.

I use the ADS too, but for a CD burner, I haven't tried it with a HD. I've been thinking on it, so let me know how this goes.
 
i would have tried installing it internally as you suggested, but the only rig I've got handy is my iBook. I'm not sure what part of the hard drive actually tells the computer how big it is, whether it's something on its circuit board, firmware, or what. I just thought that perhaps I had actually gotten a bigger hard drive than it said on the box, or whether it was actually an 80 GB drive but something on the circuit board said that it was 128 GB, or OS X just didn't know what to do with it, or the Pyro enclosure had gotten goofed somehow.

Anyway, I decided to return it, and picked up a Seagate Barracuda IV instead.

So far, the Barracuda's working like a champ.

Rat
 
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