New iMac, External Drive Problem !

L

le.sphinks

Registered
Here's a good one for you techies out there (I'm one of them, but can't figure it out).

I bought a New iMac (3.06Ghz Nvidia card, 4Gb RAM).
I also got 2 Western Digital My Book Studio Edition external HD (1TB & 500GB).

Now here's what happened.
I installed my new Mac with the software I wanted and partitioned my internal HD to use SuperDuper Sandbox feature for the first time. After all that setup my system was running fine.

Now I plug in my external HD's (via FIrewire 800, side Chained together), Leopard asks me if I want to use my 1TB for Time Machine (I say Yes), no to 500GB). My system backed up everything just fine, and I even tested Time Machine for the first time wich was kinda Fun.

But when I installed Printer Drivers later on I had to reboot my iMac (Problem starts here). When the system got back I noticed my drives weren't there. I figured maybe the iMac dosen't check for external components on startup so I would need to replug my HD everytime (I could live with that). But NO ! Even when I repluged them (one of them at a time firewire or Usb) nothing happened, I never saw them again on my desktop.

So I Googled those drive and noticed people hated them and said there were tons of problem with them. I took them at work to try on my MacPro wich still runs Tiger, they showed up fine... So I did a couple of things like upgrading the Firmware that apparently was to fix Leopard Compatibility and I formated the drives. I got home that night and tried pluging in just one drive, It appeared like a miracle. But I'm not stupid and I know that it couldn't be so easy. I unplugged it and tried plugging it in again... Nada Niet rien, nothing happened... I thought maybe my "Sandbox partition" with superduper is causing problems. I formated my iMac just to try my drives one last time. From a fresh new install the drives still didn't appear.

I took them at work again to try on another Mac (Mac Mini intel core duo) wich is running leopard. The drives showed up everytime it was pluged in.
OMG !!!!! Thats when I lost it, I don't understand... I'm running 10.5.2 just like the mac mini....!!!

So the only difference is iMac, Mac mini (The processor really).

To sum it up, if I format the drives on another machine and plug them In my imac they show once, and once Only if I reboot or unplug or whatever don't expect anything when plugging them back.

HELP !!!! PLEEEEASE !!! HELP ME !!!!
ahaha Well seriously I'm desperate I've been going crazy for the past week !
 
Have you checked system profiler and/or drive utility if they show up there? Have you connected them exclusively by FW or is USB connected in parallel? (You shouldn't do the latter!)
 
I didn't check system profiler and I believe I checked Drive utility but can't recall, I'll check but of those as soon as I get Home Tonight.

At first they were connected via Firewire 800 in a Chain since I only have one 800 port on the iMac. I also tried just one at time via Firewire or USB.

No luck ...
 
I'm having problems with external drives on my 2.9GHz 24" iMac as well. Whenever I try to copy files from a USB memory stick, it tells me I don't have sufficient privileges to do so, or the finder freezes, or it copies half of them and then freezes. Last night it crashed the finder to the point that on restart no startup disks could be found and I had to reinstall OSX. This is a serious issue and should be addressed by Apple immediately. I'm going to put a call into them.
 
For my iMac problem:

I figured it out a couple months ago.

I needed to reset the USB/firewire controller or something like that.
Basically I just had to unplug all the cables including the AC of the iMac so the computer was not receiving any electricity.

Wait a couple of minutes then replug everything back.

Pretty easy, still had to know...

Good luck !
 
I have a similar problem in that I have my WD MyBook plugged in thru USB but it doesn't show up on the desktop. When I use Disk Utility, the WD drive shows up with the Macintosh HD in the WD along with my partition disk0s3.

How do I get them out of the WD drive & the WD as a separate drive from the Mac drives. I have an iMac running OS 10.5.

Any help would be appreciated!
 
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