[stevenjo57]

Hi Dave. Thank you very much for your reply.

I must admit that sometimes I don't see the forest for the trees, and so maybe this is the case here.

If I have an external SATA drive that I want to copy data to, how do I initialize or format it if the Mac doesn't recognize that the drive is in it?

Are you saying I should put in some kind of external case or something?

If it would boot from the external firewire drive, maybe I could see using disk utility to see if it sees the internal drive, but when the new external drive is in the iMac, the iMac won't boot from the external firewire either.

Thanks for any help. I appreciate it.