Hi, I have an external drive which works fine with windows xp but cannot be read by the mac. I reinstalled the mac a couple of days ago because it was being very slow and I had a bunch of junk on it. Anyway, after that, it won't read the external drive. It will give me an error message saying that the disk is not readable by the computer. Sometimes it will give me the message saying that the drive was unmounted improperly by windows and for me to unmount it correctly. When I go back to windows, it's there, then I restart and go back to mac, it'll give me the message that the disk is not readable. I have 2 of these drives and both of them have this issue. I also tried disk warrior but it says that the file system cannot be rebuilt.

I don't know what I did but now it works.

stopped working again....

Format your External drive to FAT32. Don't forget to back your stuff up before you do it.

well, apparently it wasn't the drive and it wasn't mac. I got a new case and it had 2 USB ports in the front. So I hooked them up and ever since my usb printer wouldn't print, the drives wouldn't get read, and the usb hub wasn't working correctly. It effected all usb ports including the motherboard's. Once I disconnected them everything started working again. Thanks for the help though!

I, myself, have iDeneb 10.5.5 installed on my Seagate 500GB External Drive. If you disconnect it for some reason, it doesn't load up the first few times. The last time I disconnected (from moving my desk to the other side of the house) it took about 3-4 restarts before it would read my drivers correctly.

meh, I think it's the motherboard usb jacks now. It worked and then it stopped again. My printer's still working though so I guess that's a good thing.