Hard drive not mounting easily

G

Gabe462

Registered
I have a firewire hard drive which does not behave properly. When I plug it in it does not show up right away. Usually after opening various programs for awhile, or sometimes logging out and back in again it finds itself but this is a pain and I'd like to know how to do it right away. I used to just open Apple system profiler with the disk unplugged ad then plug it in and hit update info and the drive would pop up on the desktop, but it's not that easy any more. Also sometimes tinkering around in Disk Utility occasionally makes the magic happen.

What I would like is a little unix command that I could type in to scan the firewire bus or make it into an Applescript or something. I wouldn't mind just clicking on something to mount the drive. Sure, it'd be great if it worked properly and mounted automatically every time, but it doesn't.

Another quirky thing is when it's mounted and i select an OS 9 startup folder that is on the firewire disk, it finds it every time no sweat. Could that be because it's looking for it?

Gabe
 
so much other info you should include to give us a decent shot of what is going on. like what versions of os are you using, what mac and other external devices, what brand hd, how old is the hd, what extra items are in your startup file, etc.

i had a similar problem with my older maxtor up until the 10.1.4 release which seems to have fixed it. I had the problem before that with the Acom but updating the bridge with the assistence of their tech support solved it. I have had recognition problems in the past that Diskwarrior was able to fix. sometimes defgragmenting a drive will help. In other words, there are a lot of possibilities here and you have given us nothing but a set of symptoms.
 
Ok, I'm using a 2000 Powergook G3 ( the one with a bronze keyboard and firewire), 20GB internal, 640MB ram running 10.1.4. The Hard drive in question is a Westen Digital Caviar 80GB in a "combo" firewire/usb enclosure. The drive and enclosure are no more than a month old, and work great once they are located.

Is diskwarrior out for X yet? I haven't even checked since I've had so few problems with OSX. Need any more info? I'm not sure about my startup stuff, I haven't figured out the system file related things in X.

G
 
ok, to check startup items go to ~/system/library/startupitems. if you see any carbon apps there, remove them (they normally look like os 9 extension icons). they have been known to cause this problem. in fact anything you find in this folder that is not inside another folder is suspect.

diskwarrior is not yet in an osx version yet, though i saw the beta demo at mwsf. however the current version works on osx when booted from os 9. and its companion - plus optimizer is the best defragger out there in my opinion. on an 80 gb drive, the volume structure can get pretty spread out if you are constantly adding and deleting files from it. this seems to hang osx up at times when mounting a drive at startup.

you also don't mention any other external drives. if you have one, they may be using similar id info and thus confusing the search at startup. (i can't have my cdrw and my maxtor on the same chain because of this.) sometimes reordering your chain will solve it.
 
So there's nothing but folders in my startup items. Does that sound proper? I have no other external drives.

G
 
unless i am not remembering something, just having folders is fine and since you don't use any other externals you should be able to rule those two out.

there is potentially another startupitems folder in your ~/Library folder that some third parties place their folder in. you probably don't have one if you have limited software, but it is worth checking.

I would strongly suggest you call western digital tech support and get them to help you. if the first person tries to blow you off, insist on speaking to a manager. tell them you heard this can be caused by an incompatible bridge and would like to know if there is an update available. at the very least you will make them aware that a potential problem exists.

I guess I would just ask when the last time you repaired your system drive was? do you use a 3rd party repair program or just diskutility/fsck? (fsck is a unix type repair method that is very simple. a site search for 'fsck' should bring up several threads describing how to do it)
 
So I fixed it again. I took the jumper off (single drive position) and it worked as soon as I opened Apple System Profiler. The jumper was off before, but it started doind the same thing that just happened so I placed it into Master position. Then it started working properly, just like now.

I also ran diskwarrior last night and that didn't help. You said try disk utility/fsck. Does that mean that disk utility is just a front end for fsck? OK, call me a dunce but I couldn't find a thread that explained how to use it. There were many talking about it, but ... hey maybe there was a second page of search results. I'll try again.

Gabe
 
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