Maria’s Guides

Clarification for a reader.

Reader Mike writes about my Tiger book:

On page 63 the mounting of storage media is covered. In the first paragraph it mentions Hard Discs, which may or not be Hard Drives (the description is a little vague), but then it does not cover how to mount them (if they are in fact Hard Drives). I know there is a “look at the documentation that came with the device” disclaimer for all devices not specifically dealt with, but considering the popularity of Hard Drives I hope future editions (maybe they do already!) will describe the basic process of mounting them.

I guess the reason I didn’t get specific about mounting a hard disk in my Tiger book is because there’s really nothing to it. (I do discuss it in some detail on page 104 of my Leopard book, which expands my discussion of storage media considerably.) When you attach an external hard disk to a Mac and power it up, it’s automatically mounted. In other words, its icon appears on the desktop or in the sidebar of Finder windows so you can access it.

External hard disks are normally connected via Firewire or USB. Either cable can be connected to your Mac while it is running. Just connect the device and turn it on. Some portable hard disks are powered through Firewire or USB and don’t even have a power switch. When you plug them into a running computer, they’re automatically powered up and mounted.

The one thing you must remember is to unmount an external device before disconnecting it. This is similar to ejecting removable media. The most straightforward way to do this is to drag its icon to the trash. I cover this in both my Leopard and Tiger books.

Learn More

You can learn more about using different kinds of storage media with your Macintosh in Chapter 6 of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide. That’s where you can find discussions covering mounting and ejecting disks, burning CDs and DVDs, setting CD and DVD preferences, using Disk Utility, and setting up and using Time Machine.