External hard drive will not mount.

[SoundTheSurrender]

I bought this external laptop hard drive -

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/ol...&cp=1&id=1177112455216

I backed up my current OS X via Disk Utility onto it, swapped drives and the 200 GB hard drive booted OS X and had everything.

So now I took my 80 gig SATA drive and put it in the enclosure. The thing turns on and I can hear the disk spinning/reading but it will not mount, Disk Utility doesn't find it and there is no indication that OS X recognizes.

One time it did give me a power warning that it was drawing too much power and it was disconnected. I can't get it to say that anymore.

I went downstairs in the lab and tried the external hard drive on a MacPro G5, nothing happened, then I tried it on a Vista Machine nothing happened, and then I tried it on my room mates DELL laptop and nothing happened.

All I have left is a 60 GB Macbook SATA drive that came with the machine that I'm gonna try when I go home from college but I don't understand why it doesn't work.

Any ideas?

 

[timswim78]

Sometimes disks need to be formatted once they are put into an external enclosure. Go into disk utilities and see if you can mount or format the disk from there.

Since you are using this with a laptop, try to have your laptop plugged in, as this drive will drain the battery.

It's also possible that the enclosure is malfunctioning.

 

[SoundTheSurrender]

Laptop is plugged in and Disk Utility doesn't show anything like I said in the original post. I can't see it being malfunctioning because I used it a lot prior to switching

 

[secretanchitman]

hmm thats weird...i just plugged the same drive in (bought two yesterday) and they work fine.