WD passport drive

[ppesci]

I got a chance to use a WD passport drive on my PowerBook G4 Mac runing FC5.
Suppose that this drive is a plug and play usb device as a pen drive or mouse is, but when I connect de drive to my mac, nothing happens. No messages are found in /var/log/messages nor dmesg command.

Is there a way to solve this problem, or this drive is not plugable?.

Thanks in advance.

Pietro Pesci Feltri

[lazlow]

ppesci

Not being a PITA, you know that they have to be plugged into the wall socket (wall wart)? Some of them have a button on the front that you have to press to get to power up. I just plug mine in (both wall and usb), hit power button on drive, and 30 seconds later the icon appears. (on a pc not a mac)

Lazow

[ppesci]

This drive do not has apower button and when plug on the computer turns it's lights on and after a while, i can hear a spinning sound.

Is your drive Western Digital passport?

Pietro

[lazlow]

Some of the WDs do, some do not have the button. I would try it on another computer. The dirve may have a bad usb converter. If it works on another computer life could get interesting. You are running straight off the computers usb port (no usb port expanders)? Some usb devices do not get along with some usb port expanders. When you plug some other usb mass storage device (pendrive, sd card, etc, not a mouse) in is it recognized?

Lazlow

[ppesci]

I am using several pendrives without problems. When i plug, they connect, icon appear and mount like charm. My usb mouse works fine too.
Yes, i running direct in computer usb port, i saw linux documentation and usb drives aren a problem, only WD passport appear to be problematic. .

BTW: the drive capacity is 120GB.

Pietro

[lazlow]

Have you tried the drive on another computer? I do not know of anyone with a mac and a WD usb drive, but everyone with a pc is having no problems.

Lazlow

[ppesci]

The owner's drive use it in a pc with Windows without problems. Technical paper says these drive work with Windows and Mac OS X, but some internet sites say can be used with Linux too.

Pietro

[lazlow]

They generally work with linux and windows without a hitch (do not know about mac os).Do you know if it was formated ntfs? If it was formated ntfs you will have to load the ntfs stuff to see it (just like on a regular hd). Other than that I do not have a guess.

Lazlow

[ppesci]

I have ntfs fs module and think that this is not the problem, remember that /var/log/messages don't show entries when i connect the drive in the usb port.

Thanks anyway Lazlow. I appreciate your words.

Pietro

[yasheshb]

I had some trouble running the WD Passport. Steps i took
1 - plug in the WD to the FC5 box with the USB cable.
2 - run the command $mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usb1
The above command usually mounts my pen drive to /mnt/usb1 however it did not mount the WD passport.
it gave a message "mount: special device /dev/sdb1 does not exist"

i then did

cd /mnt/usb1
mkdir FOOBAR
rmdir FOOBAR
and ran the command again
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usb1

bingo it worked fine. no idea why it did not work in the first instance but it did work now.
i'm using Fedora Core 5.

yashesh bhatia.