New FireWire hard drive won't remount

**solo** · February 12th, 2002, 08:09 AM

I bought a FireWire enclosure for my iBook and put an extra HD in it. The install went pretty well (I don't like using the OS X version of Drive Setup to partition the disk though

). After the partitioning I put a bunch of files on the paritition I made for MacOS storage. Other partitions will be used for Linux, but they all appeared on the desktop for now.

My problems started when I unmounted the drive (I needed to use the FW port... Don't have a hub yet). I used the eject command on all the partitions that were on the desktop and unplugged the drive; no errors or anything at all. However; when I plugged the drive back in, the system reacted to it the same as if it were never partitioned at all; it ask me to use Drive Setup to configure it when I'd already done that (and used some of the partitons I set up the first time). Any ideas on what went wrong? It's not really a disaster (more of a hassle), but I would like to get the data back that I put on the drive. Any help is appreciated.

**solo** · February 13th, 2002, 08:22 AM

I didn't need to install a driver to use the FireWire enclosure on the OS X side, but I went to the OS 9 side and installed the driver there. Then I was able to see the partitions I'd created. When I rebooted back into OS X and cycled the power on the hard drive, the partitions were back there as well

.

I was afraid that my FireWire bus had gone south on me, but all is well now.

**tcjohns** · February 15th, 2002, 01:45 AM

In the early days of 9.x, with the release of itunes, authoring support and all kinds of new extensions for firewire there were lots of problems, with firewire ports on certain models of Macs disappearing. They wouldn't even show up in the system profiler. A lot of people (per various forums) sent their Macs to apple service thinking they had a problem with firewire. There were conflicts with toast and apple's extensions, and more specifically with conflict catcher 8.x (earlier versions) which completely deactivated the firewire drivers transparently. Most of these problems seem to have been worked out with subsequent updates (although toast and apple still don't play well together for disk burning). I had some problems in the past formatting firewire drives. Specifically I use the 3.5 inch drives perged from my laptops which I replaced with larger drives. Anyway, the FireXpress by compucable required propriatary software to format when using their enclosure, and they were slow in updating their software to work with 9.x. All is well now. I've also had similar problems with a full size firewire enclosure (specifically by ADS) but they now recognize apple drivers so no problem there anymore. Glad you got it working.
-Chet

**solo** · February 16th, 2002, 09:53 AM

Well, the only little bug I've got now is that; from OS 9 I can choose any of the FireWire partitions to boot from. However, none of those partitions show up in the Startup disk panel for OS X. I may be able to fix this myself, say with using fdisk at a terminal to make any one of the partitions bootable. That's IF I knew what the drive addresses are for a FireWire bus (they're different between IDE, SCSI, and whatever else).

It's things like this that really make me wish MacOS X was finished. I love using it on a daily basis now, and having to boot over to OS 9 for stuff is a pain in the butt. Not having an decent boot loader to choose between them is a pain also (that key combination at boot time doesn't work on my iBook... I only get a half painted requestor that chooses OS X, no matter what I do).