Problem Initializing New Hard Disk Drive

[Amaresh]

I recently bought a new hard disk drive. It is a 500gb saegate hard disk drive. I already have 160 gb hard disk drive attached to my motherboard. But as I am having multiple hdd cords to connect more Hdd, I tried to connect the hdd but it cannot initialize my new hdd. I tried reconnecting my new hdd but no result. I have no idea what is the real problem with my new hdd initialization.

[T.J.]

I assumed that you bought the drive installed in the case already. I thought you stated that the drive in the Firewire case is not recognized at all by your system. If you choose to format the drive internally, then reinstall in the FW case, and it's still not available, then your case must be bad. (or the cable, as I stated before) If your case is operating, and FW case was sold with a drive that size, should be format-able in the case to allow you to use all the space you paid for.

[Rawko]

The large drive limitation can be present in the firewire bridge of your firewire case, just like it can be present in the ATA subsystem. Some firewire cases can handle large drives, some cannot.

If you have a 200 GB drive and wish to use it's full capacity with your pre-Mirrored Drive Door PowerMac G4, then you can either

1. Buy an ATA card and install the drive internally. This is by far the best idea, unless you need the portability given by a firewire case. But your computer can handle many internal drives if you buy an ATA card, they will be at the fastest possible speed given the drive, not slowed down by an ATA-to-firewire bridge, and they will get the least abuse inside the computer's case. This is what I would recommend (again, unless you need the firewire case's portability).

2. Buy a firewire case that can handle large drives. From your description, your current case does NOT handle large drives. Don't even try to use it with your large drive. Get another one, or install the drive internally. Partitioning the drive will make no difference.

[deoWo]

First, make sure everything's powered on and plugged in properly (i.e. computer and HD enclosure both powered on and connected via FireWire).

Now, if System Profiler says nothing is connected to FireWire....you have one of the following:
bad FireWire cable
bad FireWire port on your HD enclosure
bad FireWire port on your computer.
Try using a different cable, then a different port on your enclosure, then a different port on your hub or computer. If the issue is w/ your computer's ports, you can try zapping PRAM, resetting in Open Firmware and the
Programmer's reset to see if that will help. If not, look for a FireWire PCI card and a powered hub.

FireWire is advertised as hot-pluggable, but MANY people have had their ports go bad by doing this. Now, I power everything off, then connect, then power on (kinda like w/ SCSI peripherals).

I've started using a powered FireWire hub and connecting everything to that, to save the ports on my computer.

[RoninBlade]

To access, install the new hard drive watching all jumper settings for the
new drive and possibly other drive on cable. Boot computer.

Right click My Computer. Left Click on Manage. Left Click on Disk
Management. A listing of all your drives will appear in the bottom right
listing starting with Disk 0 and it's partitions on the right side. Find
your new drive and then right click on the area to the right of the Disk X.
Click on Partition and assign the partitions you want to the drive. Once
that is done you will be able to format the drive's partitions to your
heart's content.

Note: Windows XP will allow you to format as a NTFS format a drive of just
about any size. If you desire to access the drive from a dual boot machine
such as Win XP and Win 9X you must partition and format using a Win 9X boot
disk with fdisk.exe and format.exe located on it. Win XP will not format a
FAT 32 disk format larger than 32 GB.