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General discussion

Powerbook not reading external drive

Apr 28, 2007 3:38AM PDT

I have a powerbook running OSX 10.3.9.. just bought a WD 80 GB external drive to free up some space on the laptop. However, my mac is not reading the drive. I have tried the drive out on other computers, and there is no problem.. works perfect. So I am thinking this is an issue with my powerbook. Doe anyone have any suggestions? This is frustrating, I've tried googling this, but no luck. All issues seem to be external hard drive related Sad


-Dean

Discussion is locked

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external drive
Apr 28, 2007 5:31AM PDT

Just got off the phone with tech support from Western Digital.. seems the powerbook USB ports dont give off enough power to properly run the external hard drive, so they are shipping a power booster cable. Im keeping my fingers crossed, hoping this resolves the issue Wink Just wanted to post for others reference..

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USB drives are not the
Apr 28, 2007 8:41AM PDT

best drives for the Mac.
A non-powered USB device, like a keyboard, mouse, thumbdrive, etc all get their power from the finite source which is the USB port. There is only a certain amount of power available and the more things that are plugged into it, the less power there is available.
Your USB drive was probably not even spinning up. You should have go a message from the system tell ing you that you did not have enough juice to run this device. Did you?

You didn't specify what version of the Powerbook you are using, earlier ones did not have USB 2.0 ports, almost certainly required by this drive, only USB 1 which was/is a very slow connection.

For future reference, Firewire is the connection of choice for the Mac, it's through put is higher than USB 2.0 (faster transfers).

Hope the power cord solves your problem. Let us know


P

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Powerbook not working hdd ext
Jul 3, 2007 10:11PM PDT

had the same problem with my powerbook. However after reading my possibilities decided to plug into the power and hey what do ya know it worked. So thanks for the advice and it really works.

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OK with later Macs...
May 4, 2007 3:18PM PDT

For information puposes, these drives (I assume it's a Passport) DO work on Macbooks without a power adapter. It was a known problem that the Powerbook USB ports didn't put out enough juice to power them. I guess it was corrected in MacBooks, and I assume MacBook Pros. When I plug mine (also a 80 GB model) into my Powerbook from work, the drive spins up but shuts down a few seconds later without booting properly. It'll keep repeating this process until unplugged. The same drive works perfectly plugged into my MacBook.

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There is a special cable to eek out more power.
May 4, 2007 10:01PM PDT
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Yeah, that's a good solution..
May 5, 2007 2:26AM PDT

Not sure if they had the dual cable when I got my Passport. Unfortunately, I ended up buying a wall wart adapter, which pretty much defeated the purpose of the compact drive. I never did use it much, but I probably will now, since it works fine with the MacBook without an adapter.