I had the hardest time just getting the damn thing initialized. Plugging in the drive resulted in a query "do you wish to initialize this drive" and a failure notice very shortly afterwards. I tried to erase it in OSX, but Drive Utility failed to mount the volume and didn't show it as a FW drive either. Verification/Repair attempts never produced any movement in the progress bars.
Drive Set-up in OS 9 did much the same thing with failure to complete initialization when plugged in and direct attempts to format the drive with Drive Setup usually were about the same, although several times it said this device was unsupported.
This was all greatly complicated by problems with WD's documentation on the placement of the jumpers. The documents said to use a jumper to set it as master, but the handy little diagram on the drive itself said to leave off all jumpers for master. Even that didn't immediately produce any results for me until, in desperation, I put the drive in my old Umax C-600 that I'd sold to a friend when I bought my Pismo. By this time I had confirmed that the firewire enclosure worked and was hoping that somehow the firewire bridge itself was screwing up my attempts to format the drive.
I was greatly discouraged by the initialization failure upon start-up, but persevered and Drive Setup worked like a charm! I copied a few files I'd forgotten to transfer when I sold it as a test and everything was perfect.
While it ought to take me a while to fill up this drive with MP3 of bootlegged concerts and the like, I will be keeping track of my old computer should I need another drive formatted.
Now if only I can get the Pismo to recognize my drives in their new two-bay enclosure! I still have some experimentation to do as I have yet to try the WD drive since I got it formatted this morning.
Jason
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