power outage & external hardrive recognition problems

edX

edX

mac shaman
ok I am baffled somewhat. I had a power outage last week that was so severe my mac did not auto reboot. When I rebooted my external hardrive was missing. another reboot got a messeage that I was attempting to mount av olume that did not contain info that my computer could read. I was given the choice to continue, initialize or eject. This happens every time when booting from osx. When booting from 9.2.1. i get a normal boot but still no hard disk. Same with any bootable disks I have made. However when i boot from ny techtoolpro 3.0.1 disk which is 9.04, everthing works perfectly . My hardrive reappears and everthing on it works. all my data is still there.
I have run diskfirstaid, techtoolpro and drive 10 on the startupdisc. I've zapped pram. I've tried to reinstall 9 but just froze the whole system up in the process. Nothing works. I cannot reintialize the disk as it is 65gb of info i have nowhere to put. I am assuming that it is system related since it works from the 9.04 startup disk.
Anyone know enough to help? Will be glad to supply anymore info as needed.
TIA!!!
 
Oh yeah: I would also suggest starting up in single user mode (hold Apple-s keys at startup) and running fsck -y to make sure that your internal drives are okay (fsck needs to be repeated until no errors are reported).
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ok i tried this but soon became lost. I became immediately intimidated when faced with a very dos like page with things i don't understand. Nonetheless it ended with the run /sbin/fsck -y then /sbin/mount (or something like that) I ran fsck -y with and without the /sbin/. Basically i got a response under catalog that something was out of order.(??). I ran it over and over (probably 10 -15 times with same results. It did not appear to be fixing anything, just checking. So if you could be more detailed and specific it would help. I also had no idea how to get out of this screen and eventually used the restart button. I am a very nuts and bolts, non technical user with no knowledge of any kind of 'languages'.

It seems like you will need to format your firewire drive to get it back to health.
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I don't understand your reasoning behind this. Since it shows up fine under 9.0.4 when booted from factory techtool disk and passes all diagnostics it seems to me that the drive is fine. The problem seems to be with the latest systems recognizing it for some reason. I would have to go buy a new drive to swap data to in able to reformat it. Reformatting my main 10gb internal drive would be feasable. I could back it up to the external while booted from disk and then reformat and reinstall. of course i am scared that if this doesn't work i might end up worse off and have no access at all to external drive to recover any of my data. this probably wouldn't happen but I am a bit shy about the idea still.

Does anyone have ANY other ideas that might help? Also I have not tried to use any data recovery from techtool since everthing seems to pass their diagnostic criteria and still not work. As of yet no real data seems to be lost.
Just exactly what file/app/resource is responsible for recognizing media and mounting it? could it be replaced? Could this possibly be damaged firmware? Is that possible?

PLEASE, would some of you unofficial mac geniuses and super geeks help me out here?!?

since my first post i have reinstalled osx and rebuilt the desktop. Also another observation i have made is that it doesn't matter if i choose continue or eject during startup, the red read/write light on the drive continues to stay lit for a considerable time although it makes no noise like when it is mounting under the 9.04 disk. This is also true when booting from 9.2.1 where it simply never appears on the desktop.:confused: :(
 
well since my last post i have partially defragmented my files on main drive and repaired them again. I then ran the fsck as per your latest instructions and this time found that everything checked out ok. However there was a string of things about finding firewire devices and needing to change the rom. one had 0rom next to it. The devices are identified with codes like 0x0x3200 or some such. System profiler shows the external is there and id's it as sym13fw500-disk drive. I took the drive off and attempted to mount it on my girlfriend's imacDV600mhz which was not on at time of power outage and i still got the unable to read info on volume window. Just like the first time i tried mounting it after the crash the classic boot stalled at start on hers. a quick reboot and classic mounted normally after the no info window. I still don't get what it is about the 9.0.4 disk that allows it to work. I am starting to believe your initial assessment that the problem is in the external but it just doesn't make sense to me. I am going to try booting from the 9.0.4 disk and running disk first aid on it while I wait for more help.

BTW testuser, THANKS for your taking the time and thought to help with this. It is really appreciated!!!!!!
 
ok now I ran disk first aid and this time it fixed 'wrapper system file needs to be repaired 0,0' and 'volume header needs minor repairs'. I then booted into 9.2.1 but with no new luck. system profiler there id's all my firewire devices as fw609e,10483 -------------sbp609e,104d8. Yet it still shows three as if it knows the drive is there along with a zip and cdrw. Another item of note is that when i shut off a computer, the red read/write light on drive stays on. It goes out momentarily when rebooting (which is how i removed it from the other computer). Again it powers up and acts normal on open and close when booted from 9.0.4 disk. Is there a way to run the fsck on the external? I am tempted to try and boot from the external by choosing one of it's system folders (9.0.4 and 9.1.1) while in 9.0.4. but not sure i want to go thru the pain of having it not work and potentially having a hard time booting at all. still :confused: and :(
 
Well I bought Diskwarrior as you advised after reading all these glowing reviews about saving a disk. Still no change. Diskwarrior fixed some stuff that others must have missed but still no drive on my osx or 9.2.1 desktop. Thanks anyway for the advice and taking the time to provide the link. It seems like a good program and it is definitly faster than techtool and seems more thorough than norton. I am sure i will put it to good use at some point in the future. Looks like I will be buying a new harddrive today to make the swapout and reformat unless anyone can figure something else out.
It just seems that the drive is trying so hard to be recognized ( the red light is on still ) and if there was just some trick to finding it once while booted from 9.2.1 or x it might be able to be repaired to the correct system id or something. This is by far the most baffling problem I have faced in a long time. although installing this drive for the first time was close second. I spent three days of my spare time figuring out that the oringinal extensions installed to drive it were in conflict with each other. Maxtor installed 4 extensions. only two were needed to make it work. Funny thing is now it is recognized without their extensions. I have gotten the latest ones during this and tried booting with and without them enabled. They obviously were not on the techtool 9.0.4 disc though. I guess I will keep at this for awhile longer before I make the 30 mile drive to the store. Thanks again testuser for trying!!
 
today before i left for a bout 8 hours, i got to thinking about my previous statement about " if there was just some trick to finding it once while booted from 9.2.1 or x it might be able to be repaired to the correct system id or something" and remembered a diskwarrior review where the person thanked them for the tip of plugging in the drive after diskwarrior was running. Sure enough this brought up the disk in 9.2.1 and so I started a repair from there and left knowing it would be a couple of hours or so before it asked me to do the next step. Well I spent too much time looking at ups systems and deciding what drive to buy and in general spending way too much time in Fry's. When i came out it was pouring rain and my usual 40 minute drive became an hour and 45 minutes. I got home just in time to watch the lights flicker and see disk first aid running at restart. I unplugged the drive since it wasn't being accessed yet. Since i wanted to use my mac for a few things before watching it repair I rebooted to osx and came here looking for any more replies - none. So i looked around at the rest of the site, made a contribution to a thread and then went elsewhere for a while. I then tried just pluggin the disk back in and voila - its on the desktop and seems to be working perfectly. so now i'm back to the idea that the problem isn't in the external it is in the recognition software at startup. Testuser, or anyone else, do you have any idea what handles that recognition and if i can change it to work some how? I would love to take the new drive i just bought back unopenend and get a nice ups instead.
 
Thankyou Testuser and thank you Diskwarrior!!!!! As of moments ago my drive has mounted on osx startup and is back on the desktop. I was right about it being the main drives recognition problem. You were right about Diskwarrior being the way to fix it. I'm taking the new unopened drive back next week and looking at ups again.

How i did it - I copied diskwarrior onto the external while mounted in osx as per previous post. I then umounted the disk and unplugged it. I rebooted from a 9.2.1 startup disk i made. When I plugged the drive in it froze the machine. so i restarted and put the 9.0.4 disk back in and faithfully rebooted. I started running diskwarrior from external to rebuild macintosh HD at 12:55. It was done by 1:23. By 1:25 it was back to normal mounting and operation. A very happy ending to this thread!! Again testuser, thanks for sticking with me on this. I hope you never need to use your own advice and get diskwarrior in a pinch, but in the end it saved the day when other repair tools run on the same drive did not. :D You can now rest easy that it was money well spent. I no doubt will write shining reviews for it wherever i get the chance. I will also say nice things about you whenever i get the chance as well. I offer your name to the computer gods as one to be smiled upon!!
 
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