# External Hard Drive not recognized on reboot



## thylacine (Aug 8, 2008)

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 !


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## VirtualTracy (Aug 8, 2008)

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 ...


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## thylacine (Aug 8, 2008)

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 ?


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## VirtualTracy (Aug 8, 2008)

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*.

.


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## thylacine (Aug 8, 2008)

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.


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