My lady friend has a Western Digital Passport (Mac Version, I believe), 320GB portable hard drive. Suddenly, and inexplicably, the drive has become unreadable on her two Apple Mac computers which had previously read the drive with no problems.
She has a desktop, Apple Power Macintosh G5 1.8 (PCI) (Late 2004) - M9555LL/A and notebook,
Apple PowerBook G4 1.33 15" 15-Inch 1.5/1.33 - M9421LL/A. Both of them have Mac OS 10.4, Tiger.
I've plugged the drive into several PCs and they are able to read the drive just fine. I've accessed the drive on several different computers, Windows 7, XP, 8 and Ubuntu, and have run diagnostics on the drive, and everything seems to be fine without.
She states that she hasn't changed anything around on her computers, and though they are old machines, they used to access the drive with no problem.
When plugging the drive in, the LED light comes on and it spins up, but it doesn't appear to be detected by the Mac machines. I've tried all of the obvious things, such as checking that the Finder preferences are set to display connected drives, and so on and so forth.
Of note, if I go into the system preferences, the drives do not show up, either.
Also, the drive is connected directly to the machines, and we've tried unhooking all other USB peripherals.
I'm not a Mac expert, but I've tried everything I could think of, and have yet to resolve this problem.
If anybody has any suggestions, it would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance!