WD 500Gb external hard drive not working.

I

iamhydrogen

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I bought a brand new 500Gb WD external HDD a couple days ago and it will not mount but it shows up in disc utilities. When i go to disc utilities and try to format it for my mac i get an I/O error right away. So then i give it to my friend who also has a mac and he was able to format to HFS. I get it back and it still does not want to mount. Is there a problem with my mac or is it the HDD?

Mac Specs: Power Mac G4 "Quicksilver" 733MHz 1.25Gb RAM running 10.4.11
 
Is your drive Firewire, or USB?
If USB, do you have a PCI USB 2.0 card installed?
USB 1 would be horribly slow, and you might see long delays, even before your drive would mount.
 
USB and no i do not have a PCI USB 2.0 card. When i plugged it in 5 minutes ago i got a volume not recognized message and i clicked initialize and it brought me to disc utility and i still get the same I/O error message.
 
FireWire would have been a much better choice for an older G4.
If the drive works on another Mac (it's a newer Mac, isn't it?), then likely the slow USB bus is not helping at all. Does your hard drive have its own power supply (separate cord for power), or does the power all come from the USB bus (and your drive has only one connection). Bus power (just USB cable) makes this worse, and the old, slow USB bus is working against you now. USB 2 is (in theory) _40_ times faster than USB 1
Where are you plugging in to USB with that hard drive? Keyboard, or back of your Mac, or an external USB hub?
You could try a USB 2.0 PCI card, which will probably fix your issues...
 
The HDD has it's own power supply. Yes, my friends mac is newer. I chose USB so that i can use it on both my mac and linux computer. I will try to get a hold of a PCI USB 2.0 card to see if that will solve the problem. Until then i will go with out an external HDD.
 
Have your friend with the Mac repartition it as APM as opposed to GUID or MBR and see if that makes a difference.
 
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