I have recently bought an external hard drive for backup. The seller (on ebay) had to move to pc for work. She used it on her iBook for about a year. It is a 60gb Toshiba from another iBook installed in a Dual Link 2,5 hard drive enclosure kit. She used it with no problems and tried to format it for her new PC but it would not perform. She then tested it again with her Mac and it showed no signs of any bad sectors or other problems. My problem is: when I plug in the Firewire 6 pin cable to my iBook and then into the External Drive a red light comes on and switches to green I can hear a soft whirr in the External drive BUT NO ICON appears on my desktop. I also tried the same proceedure with my USB printer cable because the case has both ports. Still nothing. I can not be sure it ever worked of course but this seller seemed very sincere and took a lot of time answering my questions before and after the sale. She recommended that I try a forum for more help so here I am. 'mature' mac user trying hard to get better 'mature' mac user trying hard to get better

Open Disk Utility, found in your Utilities folder in your Applications folder. See if the drive appears in there. You might be able to select it and click 'Mount' on the toolbar. Unfortunately this does sound like a hardware problem to me, but you never know. Sometimes the problem with external hard drives can actually be the power supply being used. Joshua Coventry Mac dude