Help With Hard Drives

[Redjack]

I'm at my wit's end and thought I'd give it a shot on this forum.

I have two hard drives, one an external WD Passport 120GB that was formatted for Mac and the other is an internal (converted to external USB) Fujitsu 60GB hard drive that originally came with my PB 12".

These drives used to mount on the desktop of my Black Macbook for a bit, but that was a few months ago. I've since sold my Black Macbook and obtained a 17" PB G4 1.67GHz, etc... Whenever I plug in the hard drives, they both started to make a clicking sound. Uh oh, there may be something really wrong and I thought my data was long gone.

Then, on a whim, I took out my Toshiba Windoze Laptop and plugged them both in, and wouldn't you know both hard drives sprang to life (no clicking) but did not mount. I think the hard drives are damaged because I tried using both TransMac and HFSExplorer to see if I could salvage my data. No go.

What else can I do? I feel that if the hard drives are spinning and Windows recognizes whenever I plug them in and recognizes them as HD's in device managers but I can't seem to get data off the drives. Is there a way to force mount them in Leopard or Windoze?

If I posted in the wrong areas/forums please direct me correctly, I apologize if this is *off* topic. Thanks for any help!

 

[porter]

Whenever I plug in the hard drives, they both started to make a clicking sound. Uh oh, there may be something really wrong and I thought my data was long gone.

Are they powered by the USB port or by external powersupply? It sounds like the drives aren't being given enough power to operate.

 

[coius]

It basically means that your powerbook can't provide the necessary power to spool up the HDDs. You might either need to get a USB -> IDE/SATA Converter that you can apply external power through a wallwart or the such. When you can't spin up the drive, you cannot read it

Also, it may not be damaged, but you may need to get a Leopard/tiger disc because of the EFI Boot record (GUID). Windows can't read it because it's not an MBR or a boot record that is associated with the whatever windows uses and/or the programs you use can't read the EFI (GUID)

Try finding someone with an intel mac. At least an OS X 10.4 install newer than 10.4.5 or the like.

 

[Redjack]

You folks guessed right, my drives are not powered by external power. I'm really surprised that the PB 17" USB 2.0 ports don't have enough juice, isn't that weird?

I'm very optimistic, what I can try and do is use my old PB 12" which, in fact, these drives mounted on before. If that fails, I will have to get that IDE->SATA converter and try it that way.

 

[Christopher]

Some laptop ports are underpowered, by my guess to save power when you use them on battery. I had this issue when i got an iPod Touch and I only had my iBook 500Mhz with me and it simply would not sync.

 

[waynestewart]

A powered USB hub should do it then

Wayne