Hi, I've been using a mac for a long time, but still find myself to be somewhat computer illiterate...i bought a new 120 GB SimpleTech portable hard drive and when i plug it into my g4 powerbook, its not reading it...ive tried plugging it into my desk top (also a mac) and that reads it perfectly fine...when i try going to the troubleshooting pages, they all say to go to the disk utilities and erase some hard drive and something else will pop up...but i'm scared it'll erase everything on my computer...

please help!! thank you...also, if u could not use the technical computer jargon, i would greatly appreciate that...

thanks!

Well... does your Mac detect it? Try using Disk Utility to check if your Mac recognizes the second hard drive.

1. Plug your external hard drive into your PowerBook.
2. Disk Utility is in the Utilities folder, which is located within your Applications folder. Start it up.
3. Look in the left pane to see which hard drives are listed (see picture attachment below). The hard drive has the size before it (in this example, 55.9 gigabytes). Is your external hard drive listed also?

No, that's another reason why i'm so confused, my PowerBook won't even detect it...

Can you please do the following:

1. Plug and unplug the hard drive from the PowerBook repeatedly (three or four times).
2. Go into Applications/Utilities and start up Terminal.
3. Type diskutil list and hit Return.
4. Post the contents of what the Terminal gave back.

/dev/disk0
#: type name size identifier
0: Apple_partition_scheme *74.5 GB disk0
1: Apple_partition_map 31.5 KB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 74.4 GB disk0s3
/dev/disk1
#: type name size identifier
0: 8BELOW_US_WS *7.4 GB disk1

What versions of OS X are the PowerBook and the desktop Mac you mentioned earlier (the one that detected the hard drive) running? To find this, go to the Apple menu and click "About this Mac".

the power book is version 10.4.10 and the desktop is 10.3.9

Hmm, that's odd. What is the model number of the SimpleTech hard drive?

I had a similar problem using an external hard drive I purchased for backup on my new MacBook Pro laptop. I formated the drive using my Mac Pro desktop and plug in the drive to my laptop. The HD icon didn't appear on the desktop? I check disk utilities and the drive wasn't there "Very Strange." So I went back to my other computer and the icon appeared on the desktop. I pulled out Disk Warrior and ran it and I found the HD icon. It showed several problems after running and updated the corrections.

Now the external HD icon appears on both my computers. Maybe you have a friend who has disk warrior to lend you?

so, being the most impatient person ever, i decided to return the simpletech hard drive and bought another western digital 160 gb....same problem...ive tried the same things and still nothing.