External Hard Drive not recognized on reboot

thylacine · #1 August 8th, 2008, 03:21 AM

Running a Mac Mini (10.5.3) with an external Iomega hard drive connected via USB.

The hard drive has been formatted and assigned to Time Machine and backup works OK.

The problem I have is that whenever I restart/reboot the Mac Mini, the Iomega drive is no longer recognized/mounted by my system (no icon on desktop). The Iomega drive stays running since it has its own power switch. I need to power it down and then power up for it to be recognized again by OS X whenever I restart.

Why do I need to do this and is there any way that I can avoid having to power on and off to have the disk recognized ?

Any help/ideas would be gratefully appreciated !

VirtualTracy · #2 August 8th, 2008, 04:49 AM

When you write that after a restart/reboot the ext drive is not recognised/mounted, have you looked in Disc Utility to see whether the drive is recognised even tho' there is no icon on your Desktop ....

I say that because there might be no need to power the drive down/up again ... I'm curious to know about the Disc Utility thing first ...

thylacine · #3 August 8th, 2008, 07:29 AM

Thanks for your posting...

Bit of a Mac newbie (but after years of Microsoft it's nice to have a grown up operating system !!) so didn't go automatically to the Disk Utility.

Have now restarted and the disk icon did not appear on the desktop and also DOES NOT show in the disk utility when I reboot.

If I flick the power switch then the disk appears in Disk Utility.

What can I do to have the disk permanently recognized ?

VirtualTracy · #4 August 8th, 2008, 07:46 AM

I've seen a workaround that required creating an Automator Application to:

get the specific server (afp://10.0.1.1:548)
connect to the specific server

You then need to add this application as a Login Item and the ext TM drive should mount each reboot.

BTW, how often do you reboot your Mac? I leave mine running in one state or another pretty much 24/7.

Apparantly, the iomega hd is one that seems to have this issue, according to this.

.

thylacine · #5 August 8th, 2008, 10:05 AM

Yeah... I leave my Mac up most of the time so this is just a niggling problem that occurs every now and again ! I haven't got my head fully around securing/hardening my Mac and also we get some electrical storms so sometimes I take the thing down so it doesn't get zapped or hacked !!! When I think I've got it secure will leave it running.

I understand the concept of using Automator and creating a startup app but I can't AFP to a localhost ! What about a mount shell script ? Is there another way to do this or am I missing something with AFP ? Of course the external disk drive will have my local IP address.