Ask Jacob

If your new Iomega external drive has both USB and FireWire ports, you can use a FireWire cable to perform the partitioning and backup. If your hard drive only has a USB port and the USB ports are disabled on your Macbook Pro, you may have to find an alternative way to transfer, such as going machine to machine, using FireWire Target Disk Mode.

As for Partitioning the drive, there is an application, inside the Utilities folder on your Mac, called Disk Utility. Disk Utility has the ability to help you format your hard drive and partitions. For Windows machines, the format is NTFS. For Macs, it’s Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Your Mac can view both partitions, however the Windows machine can only see the NTFS partition.

I hope this information has been helpful.

Dennis Beaman
Ask Jacob Team

Well most Apple Authorized service centers can help you. You can find the nearest location here.

You can also try and repair the drive with Disk Utility, found in the OS X Utilities folder which, is in the Applications folder. If Disk Utility fails to see the drive, you can try removing the internal drive from the external drive case. It could be that your external hard drive is OK but the drive enclosure has failed. To test this, you can connect the raw drive to your computer with a Newer Universal Drive USB 3.0 Adaptor.

As a side note, you said “I’m afraid I’ve lost all of my backed-up files forever” which would indicate this drive was your backup drive. In a good backup process you need to have at least two copies of every important file. It is not backing up if you move a file to an external hard drive and then delete it off of your internal hard drive. That is not backing up, just changing locations. Any hard drive will fail eventually. So to be backed up, please make sure you have at least two copies and preferably three copies with one being at a different location than your computer.

You may also view this Ask Jacob post for my recommendation on a back up drive.

- Jacob

It is sometimes nice to use a third party to be the intermediary in the transfer process. I like to use Gmail for this. Here is Microsoft’s pages on how to get your contacts loaded into a free Gmail account:

Export Outlook contacts to Google Mail
Transfer contacts between Outlook and Google Mail

Then in your Mac’s Address Book Application, go to the Preferences. Under the Accounts tab mark the checkbox for “Synchronize with Google” and enter the credentials for your Gmail account. This will let you transfer your Outlook contacts over the network. Additionally, syncing them with your Gmail account will make sure that they are always available to you. You can view them via the internet in your Gmail account, they will be constantly backed up from your Mac, and easy to export out of Gmail if you need to.

Jacob

Are you sure that you have the original install DVDs for your system? Most gray labeled discs are locked to the exact generation computer that they shipped with.

Most Dual 2.7 G5s shipped with 10.4.0 and did not have 10.4.2 DVDs. Those 10.4.2 DVDs were included in the generation after that model. However, if you are sure that they work on your G5, It may just be a problem with the destination drive. If you have a second internal drive you could experiment with, try installing 10.4.2 on that drive.

Then use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone that fresh install onto your external hard drive. Dont forget to format the External Drive as a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume with a Apple Partition Map. Those are often the default settings when using Disk Utility to partition a drive.

Jacob

I often recommend the MCE replacement drives, like this MCE Internal 8x SuperDrive Upgrade for MacBook and MacBook Pro 15-inch.

Hope this helps
- Jacob

The original Quicksilver G4 PowerMac towers could only use hard drives that were 128GB or less in size. The 2002 Quicksilver G4 PowerMac tower could take any size ATA hard drive.

If you have a 733, 867 or Dual 800 MHz processor than you have the original Quicksilver. If you have a 800, 933 MHz, or Dual 1GHz processor you have the 2002 Quicksilver and can use larger hard drives.

Hope this helps.
- Jacob

Hi Nancy,

There is no drive size limit for SATA based Macs, like yours. You should be fine going up to 2TB in each drive bay. Take a look at our internal hard drives, as we carry both Western Digital & MCE. These brands will certainly fit the bill for your storage needs.

- Jacob