I have a WD Elements Desktop 2TB that I use to archive video files edited on a Mac Pro. I partitioned the drive from NTFS to HFS+ myself with no problems and have been using it for the better part of a year in that capacity. I reciently quit my job as a video editor to become a stay at home dad and brought this drive home with all my archived videos on it. It mounts perfectly on my oPlay device and on my Dell notebook via HFSExplorer. However, it will not mount on my old iMac G4 (800mhz, 512Mb, Leopard). I can see the drive in Disk Utilities but there is no partition listed.
I know the partition still exists and is working - I can read it on my Win7 computer and a cheap media player! Why can’t a Mac read this drive, and how do I get it fixed so it can read the drive??? I can get this Mac to read NTFS discs through Tuxera, I can get it to mount USB drives, the cable is good and plugged directly into the back of the iMac, the power supply is good and plugged directly into the wall, I swapped USB ports, I rebooted, and I’m really at a loss. I thought maybe the USB 1.1 ports of the iMac would prevent the partition from loading, but then why does Disk Utility recognize the presense of the drive? I thought maybe Snow Leopard, the OS on my video editing Mac Pro, partitioned the WD in a different version of HFS+ that Leopard isn’t compatible with, but my research indicates that HFS+ is compatible all the way back to OS8. i also thought maybe the old iMac just won’t work with large drives like a 2TB, but it seems willing to repartition the drive for 1.8TB (not about to try that though).
If anyone has any ideas on how I can get this to work I’d really appriciate it. It’s driving me batty and keeping me awake.
Thanks,
-Greg
