MacBook external hard-drive won't mount

[lorcani]

I built a 320Gb external hard-drive this afternoon by putting a SATA Seagate drive in an i-rocks external cradle. Both had really good reviews on Newegg.

When I plug it into my MacBook, I get a series of problems. Either:

1) The drive will function normally for a few minutes and then stop responding and Disk Utility can't unmount it at all. Most times I'll have to force-quit out of Disk Utility.
2) The drive will fail verification and subsequent repair.
3) The drive won't let me format or Partition it, and it will either hang with the pinwheel and the bar frozen, or it will give me an error like "Input/Output Error" or "The underlying task reported failure."

I've tried it on two separate MacBooks, and have had nothing but bad luck. Its all brand new components, and the drive sounds like its working correctly. Its never been formatted before I put it in the cradle.

Any ideas?

 

[CEpeep]

Is it Firewire by any chance? My MBP has basically the same issue with my external FW drive. I still haven't found a fix, even after reinstalling the OS from scratch. Hopefully whatever is causing it will be fixed in Leopard.

 

[KevySaysBeNice]

No help here, but I will say I've had nothing but trouble with external HDs on my brand enw MacBook Pro. I have a fat32 drive, a ntfs drive, and another smaller fat32 drive. I am lucky if I can get one of them to mount at a time. I've NEVER gotten more than 1 drive to mount at a time, but i've gotten all of them to mount at one time or another (using a USB 2 hub of course). It's extremly annoying.