On Feb 15, 2010, at 1:32 PM, mark ray wrote:

 I have a dozen IDE hard drives of assorted sizes and makes from 4GB up to 
250GB that maybe one or two are definitely bricks. When I hook them up in an 
external enclosure some show up in Disk utility (only the first line, the 
second does not show on the left hand side in the listing of drives) and they 
don't mount. I can't run first aid and it looks like I can reinitialize some of 
them but not others. Before I try the reinitialize option I would like to see 
what is on them first. Drive Genius and Tech Tool do not see them either, only 
Disk Utility does so far. The others mount and run fine. I have tried different 
USB and firewire ports and cables, a different enclosure as well with no 
improvement.

*****

I encountered this problem yesterday. The issue in my case turned out to be 
insufficient power to the external drive enclosure, which when enhanced with a 
secondary USB (I assume it might as effectively been through an AC power brick) 
power supply to the 5 volt DC power receptacle on the enclosure, the seemingly 
unreadable drive suddenly immediately became readable, and I was then 
successful in  transferring the data on the drive in the enclosure to my new 
MacBook. In my case, the extra power was supplied by a cable with a USB 
connector attached to the second USB receptacle on the MacBook, which has the 
right size cylindrical plug for the drive enclosure's auxiliary power 
receptacle at the other end.

It might be worth note that this same external drive enclosure, containing the 
same hard drive, when used via FireWire on my PowerBook G4, without any 
external power supply, is able to boot and operate the PowerBook G4.

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