I had a weird little problem with my external FireWire hard drive on my Mac and wanted to post about it since I didn’t find any immediate solutions online. I like to fill these kinds of posts with keywords so there’s a better chance of the post ending up in Google. So I had this problem with my AcomData miniPal 160GB external FireWire drive. It’s attached to a non-Intel Mac Mini. I run iTunes on the Mac and rip all my CDs to the external drive.
The other day I went to play a song over the network and it just wouldn’t play. I logged into the Mac (using RealVNC, since I run it “headless”) and tried playing the songs directly on that machine. The little exclamation came up letting me know it could find the MP3. That’s when I noticed the external hard drive wasn’t mounted. I tried powering the hard drive off and on, and then restarting the Mac. Nothing worked. I was assuming the worst – that the hard drive had died.
I decided to plug it into my PC, which recognized it instantly. Woo, I knew it wasn’t the drive that had gone bad! So why wasn’t the Mac seeing it? I plugged it into my Intel Mac Mini and that saw it as well. The AcomData site suggests:
First, make sure the connections are secure. Second, check if your mini Pal is listed in the Apple System Profiler. If the driver listed is “USB Authoring Support” or “Toast USB Support”, disable this Extension(s) in the Extensions Manager, as they can cause a conflict with the mini Pal.
But none of that helped. My drive wasn’t listed and neither of those extensions were listed either.
I did some more searching and came across a forum post suggesting you power down the Mac and disconnect the power supply for 30 seconds. Lo and behold, that worked! Hooray!
