WD Passport HD question

[dbow]

So I bought one of the 250GB Passports from BB on sunday and put it in my MBP last night and it is working fine. My question is that I took the old 160GB drive and put it in the WD case and it doesn't work, it powers up spins but doesn't show up in the finder of any of the machines around here. I even pulled the drive out and tried it with the USB interface outside of the case. Any ideas?

[JJ]

So does it work on the USB interface outside the case? And what do you mean by that?

[thermarest]

Wish I could help. I recall reading somewhere on the web that this happened to others as well. Some drives just need a little extra power, I think. I bought the same 250 on sunday. The 80GB drive from my MacBook runs fine in the case after the swap.

[dbow]

I meant that I tried to run it outside the case with the bridge board just to make sure something wasn't binding.

The power thing sounds familiar, I think I may have heard something about that.

[blusubaru]

Yup. I had the same issue a while back. You'll probably find discussion about that here with a little searching. I wound up making an image of my boot drive through FTM on one of my other Macs using DU. Then installed the 250 and used DU to restore from the disk image. Worked like a charm.

[space-time]

does it show up in Disk Utility? maybe all you need is a reformat? who knows, some of these "bridges" are non-standard.

[JJ]

[quote dbow]I meant that I tried to run it outside the case with the bridge board just to make sure something wasn't binding.

The power thing sounds familiar, I think I may have heard something about that.
So did it work with the external bridge board?

[dbow]

It doesn't show up in disk utility. I think the power theory might be right.

[olnacl]

You can buy USB cable with dual connectors that may power a drive that can't get enuf from a single USB port. Of course finding one may be the trick.
http://bixnet.net/images/Cab-USB-YBlack.jpg

[Ken Sp.]

same thing happened to me. Did you try the USB on the right side? Due to other internal devices the right side worked foe. The passport it self worked everywhere. It was a problem when I used the old internal in the WD case.