After improperly ejecting drive, I get the spinning beach ball WAYYY too much

R

Roadie

Registered
Hello,

A few weeks ago I hooked up a external hard drive (a vantec nexstar 3 usb 2/eSata enclosure witha 500gb maxtor inside) to my g4 mac mini. Like a doofus, I unplugged the usb cable before ejecting the drive, got, the error message about the drive possibly being damaged, and sure enough it won't mount now, won't even be recognized.

Anyway, since that happened, I am getting the spinning beach ball every few minutes. it will hang for about 7-10 seconds and then continue, and it's starting to drive me crazy. I've got a gig of ram in the mini, and I've never had any issues with it at all until that happened.

I've run all sort of system maintence to try and clear it up...applejack, techtool, disk repair, blah blah...I don't know what else to do. Anybody out there have an idea about what's going on?

On a side note, anyone have any idea about what to do about my hard drive that wont be recognized? I have my whole itunes library on there.
 
Firstly for your exeternal, if you cant mount it at all then the only possibility I can think of is that there are companies out there that you can pay to get the data of a drive for you.

Out of interest what does disk utility say about it? Or doesn't it even see it when it's plugged in?


Onto your mac mini. Again what does disk Utility say about the disk?
If you had a backup, I'd suggest a re-install of your System, since your external looks dead, I'd guess that that is out of the question.
Also, what happens if you boot from the install disk and run disk utility on your HD from there.*

Also have you tried booting in Safe mode? (hold down shift key straight after hearing startup chime)
 
Try restarting your machine with the external drive connected. It will sometimes make the drive visible in Disk Utility.

Try zapping the PRAM 3 times in succession. This can also provide positive results in some circumstances. I know you tried blah blah... but I can't tell if you tried this. :p

If you cannot make it show up, see if you can borrow another similar drive enclosure. It's possible that the enclosures board got fried.

Many external Firewire enclosures use a bridge board to convert the wiring and signals back and forth between the computer's fast firewire port and the enclosure drive's connection. I presume (perhaps erroneously) this is what yours has.

After you have determined what's up with the drive and either repaired it, or replaced it, backup your computer's data (many third party apps can be backed up and restored without problem, with such notable exceptions of Adobe/MacroMedia apps, and Quark) and do a clean install of the OS.
Third party drivers, preference panes, and any 3rd party Dashboard widgets installed for All Users, will probably need to be reinstalled as well.
 
good idea to zap the pram, no i hadn't tried that yet. Didn't help any though, still getting driven crazy by the spinning beach ball.

I'm going to try and stick the external drive into my friends g5 tomorrow to see if it's the drive or the enclosure.
 
Unplugging the drive like that can damage it, it's happened to me. Luckily, tech support got a replacement in quickly.
 
i have just today had a similar problem with a vantech nextar 250GB external HDD
(maxtor HD inside, i believe??)
using for months via firwire
g4 mac powerbook detects the drive in system profiler & disk utility,
partition still shows the name i gave it
though that partition appears in faint text in disk utility disk list
and will not mount
(also no icons in finder windows)

(the external drive also has a USB out which i have not tried...)

anyone had this before and know what to do?
i'd hate to have to re-import all those itunes files . . .

cheers,
mb
 
Hi No Ext Drives But Spinning Ball Is Driving Me Loopy Minding My Own Business Anywhere On My Osx Suddenly Arrow Turns To Ball Ball Turns & Turns I Have To Shut Down Via Power Button Pls. Help
 
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