I'm developing a new sport - Olympic Mac-cussing.

I use - used - a 1Tb Tosh external hard drive partitioned into Mac and FAT32 areas for transferring data between PC and Mac and as backup storage. Several times I've noticed in the last few months that the drive will become busy while apparently sat idle. Then on Monday when AFAIK it was sat idle up popped the warning message box about ejecting drives before removal.

Odd.

Even odder - the cable was still attached, but the icons for both partitions were missing.

After power cycling, when I plugged the drive into the USB port I normally used it would become busy, but fail to be recognised. When I plugged it into the other USB port absolutely nothing happened and the drive remained undetected.

So I took the drive home. The XP box recognises and can view the FAT32 partition, the Linux box recognises and accesses both FAT32 and Mac partitions. I'm (slowly) transferring data between the backup region and LBHDD as I type.

I don't have a spare external HDD, but was able to borrow one, and yup, it's recognised fine by the Mac.

Where does that leave me?

I suspect it's the crappy USB port hardware and possibly drivers on the Macbook. I had a USB hub become unusable a while back, and the HDD is behaving similarly. I wonder now if simply using a different USB cable is all that's required - watch this space. If so, this is VERY unimpressive. I wonder if Apple would replace the port connections under warranty? I wonder if it would take them less than a week?

*edit*
Swapped round a variety of cables, the drive just chattering away to itself a few seconds after plugging into either port (this was a change from before). After the last cable change I plugged it into the original USB and just left it there to chatter away, and suddenly, after a couple of minutes of activity the activity light pattern changed, drive icons appeared on the desktop and eventually it started backing up.

Now I'm nervous. I'd quite like to migrate to snow leopard, but won't do it without a reliable backup copy 'just in case'. But I'm also now unsure whether the issue is the drive or the Macbook, and don't want to spend 60 quid to find out.