iBook G4 and external hard drives

J

jengal4

Registered
Hi,

I just purchased my second external hard drive here in Korea where I'm living, a Philips USB 2.0 2.5 inch 250GB for my iBook G4 (Mac OS X version 10.4.11) and am frustrated because i don't know what i'm doing wrong. First of all, the box says that it "supports IDE drives up to 250GB" - what is an IDE drive?

Secondly, when I attach the hard drive to my computer, via USB, the icon does appear on my desktop, but then when i try to click and drag files into it, it says "(this file) could not be added because (this hard drive-in Korean) could not be modifed." agghhhh! isn't that the whole point? to modify the hard drive by added files to it?

I tried going to my Finder and dragging files into it there, and it seems to add them ok (the green "+" sign appears) but then when I click on the hard drive icon to see what files are there now I can't see anything. There only appears a folder called "System Volume Information" and when I click on it there appears a black icon that says under it, "Mount Point Manager Remote Database." What the heck does that mean? When I click on that, an empty, blank window pops up.

I don't know how external hard drives should look like because I've never had one that i could figure out. Aren't these things supposed to be easy?

Thanks for your help!

Jennifer
 
With the drive connected, launch Disc Utility which is in the Utilities Folder within the Applications folder. Pressing Command + Shift + U in Finder, is a keyboard shortcut to the Utilities Folder.

You should see your Ext HD in the left collumn. Click on it and have a look at what it tells you at the bottom section of the overall window next to "Format:".

Your Phillips Drive is possibly formatted as NTFS (New Technology File System); the standard file system of Windows.

Here is a handy link to what comes next:

Formatting & Partitioning a Hard Drive in OS X - Tiger and Leopard


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