Firelite hard drive not recognised

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Level 1

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Firelite hard drive not recognised

My iBook G4 just stopped recognising my Firelite Smartdisk external hard drive. The drive's light comes on when plugged into the firewire port but the icon does not appear on the desktop or in the finder window and the files on the drive (music and photos) cannot be accessed. Restarting does not help. It may be unrelated, but at the same time as this problem started the computer stopped playing the 'chord' at startup.

iBook G4, Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Posted on Feb 28, 2008 4:13 PM

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Answer 1

John Huber1

Level 6

17,745 points

Feb 28, 2008 4:46 PM in response to banbikas1

Hi,

You may want to launch Disk Utility and try to repair the external drive.

It would also be a good idea to put the install disc in the drive and start while holding down the "c" key. Once started click through the install screens past the language screen then select Disc Utility from the Utility menu (Installer menu in Panther), highlight the iBook's drive on the left and click on Repair Disk. If it reports errors and repairs repeat the process until no errors are reported. If it reports an error it can't repair post the error message here.

John

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Answer 2

banbikas1 Author

Level 1

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Feb 28, 2008 10:00 PM in response to John Huber1

Thanks, John.

I inserted another flash drive into my USB port and the Firelite icon appeared at the same time. However, the computer still cannot access any files on the drive. Simply clicking on the icon in the finder window causes the spinning wheel to appear - it sometimes stops spinning when I lift or tilt the hard drive. I went to disk utility as you suggested and attempted to verify the hard drive before repairing. This again resulted in the spinning wheel and eventually the following message appeared:
Verifying volume “FireLite 120 GB”
Verify volume failed with error Could not unmount disk

I tried to eject the drive using the eject button at the top of the disk utility window - this also resulted in an error message 'the disk could not be unmounted'

Any suggestions?

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Answer 3

banbikas1 Author

Level 1

0 points

Feb 28, 2008 10:45 PM in response to John Huber1

Hi again

Now it seems to be working ok, but only in certain positions. I'm guessing it might be a problem with the firewire cable. Does this make sense? And if it's a cable problem, how come the power doesn't seem to be affected (the drive's green light comes on at startup regardless of whether the computer then recognises the drive)?

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Answer 4

John Huber1

Level 6

17,745 points

Feb 29, 2008 10:44 AM in response to banbikas1

Yes, the cable could be bad. Power and data are on separate wires within the cable. Most Windows computers use 4 pin cables (no power) whereas Macs use 6 pin.

John

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