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External HDD disappeared

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by brifd1

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I have had a Seagate external HDD plugged in to my G5 Mac for perhaps a year without incident. Ironically, I had purchased it to be my backup. Recently, its image stopped appearing on the desktop when I started up the Mac. It has two places it can plug into it, I think it's Firewire, but only 1 on the Mac itself. I'm going to try plugging it in to a different computer, but that would be a PC (which hopefully has a Firewire plug in. Fortunately, I think at least most of the documents therein are readable on a PC. Any ideas as to why the Mac stopped recognizing this external drive, which hasn't been moved or fiddled with since it was plugged in for the very first time???

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by oh smeg

Only the obvious if the drive has been left running all of the time that the Mac is running and not dismounted before shutting down the MAC.

The partition Tables have been corrupted and possibly the Platters have been damaged from the Read/Write Heads dragging across the platters when the drive is improperly shut down. Also if it been left running for long periods of time it's Overheated and started to degenerate.

If you want to use an External Drive for Long Periods of Time you need an Actively Cooled Case like the MX1 from Antec

http://www.antec.com/Believe_it/product.php?id=NDc=

Which is either USB or ESATA but defiantly not Firewire. You also need to mount and Dismount the drive separately from the Computer before shutting down and after turning on.

You can use the Seatools Diagnostic to test the function of the External Drive but you should expect it to have gone to Silicon Heaven if you have been using it all the time that the Mac has been on. ;)

Col

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