External hard drive completely fails to mount on Mac 10.4.8?

Question

I have an external usb hard drive enclosure and It works nicely with 3 other hard drives that I have, but when I plug in this Maxtor 120GB hard drive... nothing happens.

Disk Utility detects nothing, there's nothing on the desktop, AND after that nothing else will mount, not even the hard drives that were working before, until I restart my computer.

I am 98.3% certain that the hard drive is functional as I used it just a few days ago inside another computer.

Also, would the Hard Drive being locked cause something like this?
(I'm pretty sure it isn't locked, but it just might be...)

Answer 1

If other drives work but one doesn't, well...? The problem is with the one that doesn't. Even if something worked fine before, it may not work fine today. Yesterday was a different day and things can change in one second, much less in a few days. Have you tried the other drives since you began to have a problem with the one drive? Maybe suddenly, the other drives have a problem, too.

If the other drives still mount fine on the Mac TODAY (forget about yesterday), then you must focus on the one drive that is flaking out. Why not connect this USB case / hard drive to a Windows computer and run a disk check on it? If it fixes errors, maybe it will work on the Mac. If the disk check finds no errors, there could still be some problem with the format. Disk check programs are not perfect. Copy all data to a backup and format the drive. Then I think it will mount on the Mac.