Back home again...

[sarahmichigan]

I don't suppose anybody reading this might know why, when I hook up a portable hard drive to my computer with a FireWire, I can see it with the Device Manager and it says it's working properly but I can't actually access the information on the drive?

In other news...

I'm home from Virginia where we went to visit my brother and sis-in-law and do touristy things. We saw colonial Williamsburg and went to the Suffolk Peanut Festival and generally enjoyed the warmer (70s and 80s) weather down there. Fell in love with my brother's dog, Scoobie. He is part wire terrier and part something else and altogether cute and mellow. Had a good time reconnecting with my brother. He has mellowed somewhat with age but is just as weird as he ever was.

While I was gone, I had three articles go to print in two different publications. Well, I guess "print" isn't entirely correct since one is online only as far as I can tell, but still groovy.

Executive Profile: John Coy, owner of Fran Coy Salon
I had fun touring his facility and seeing all the "green" improvements they've made.

Meditation grows in popularity for both health and spiritual reasons
They did some copy editing of this, but I was much happier with their mostly hands-off approach than I was with a previous article I did for their "Faith" section.

Detroit Derby Girls talk about derby life, filming of 'Whip It'
This was a fun one to report.

Comments

[jojomojo.livejournal.com]

Perhaps you're using a PC and the hard drive is from a Mac or Linux box? (if Windows can't understand the filesystem format on the drive, it won't show up)

[melstav]

This.

In my experience, most firewire hard drives in use are used on Macs. And while you *can* format a drive on a Mac as FAT32 so you can use it on both a mac and a Windows computer, it's not what happens by default.

If this is the case, there is a program you can download that will let you read Mac-formatted drives in windows (but not write to them) called HFS Explorer

[sarahmichigan.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the tip. I downloaded HFS Explorer, but when I open it up, none of the menu items seem to be able to help me look at the portable hard drive, either.

[melstav]

Hmm...

I've never worked with HFS Explorer, but it looked potentially promising.

Two other programs you might try:

MacDrive is commercial software. It costs $50, but they do offer a free trial download. I haven't run it, but I'm guessing it will let you use it for some number of days before forcing you to either register or uninstall. Either that, or it won't let you write to the disk.

MacDisk -- Also commercial software (~$51) with a limited-feature-set free download.

Of these two, I'd be more inclined to go with MacDrive (the first one)

[chimalis.livejournal.com]

I know the Coys!

[aedifica]

When I run into that at work, it's most often a drive letter conflict--the new drive is trying to use a drive letter that another device has already taken. Not sure if that would be the case for you, though.

Oh, I'm in print.

[novapsyche.livejournal.com]

What a great welcome home present. :)

[oneirocritical.livejournal.com]

I would love to join a roller derby league but there isn't one very close to me. That must have been really cool to report.

[purple-marf.livejournal.com]

You may need to install additional drivers for the drive. It may have recognized it incorrectly or incompletely. You should be able to download something from the manufacturer's site based on make & model of the drive.

Also, you can try to see if windows sees it as a drive at all, you'll get some additional options here:

Start, Run, compmgmt.msc (ok)
Now look for Storage - Disk Management
This should list your computer's internal drives (hard and CD), as well as any externals you've plugged in that have been recognized. You can try right-clicking on it to see if there are any funky options (if there's nothing on the drive that you want, you can try formatting it or some such).