Unable to access external hard drive

R

rreyrich

Registered
Hello,

I'm using a 1.42ghz Macmini running 10.4.11. I've been using a Lacie 500 G firewire external hard drive for over a year to store and retrieve files. I have several movies in the mp4 format stored on the Lacie external hard drive. I recently opened one of the movies in full screen (quicktime). It ran for about 10 minutes before freezing up. I watched the spinning beach ball for about 5 minutes. Unable to force quit Quicktime, I pulled the plug on the Macmini. After restarting the computer, the icon for the Lacie external hard drive no longer appeared on the desktop.

I tried several different things to get the icon back, including: repairing the permissions and shutting down the external drive and unplugging the power supply for several minutes before reconnecting the external drive to the computer. The external drive doesn't show up in either the System Profiler or Disk Utilities.

Thanks you for your time.

Ron
 
Try this: connect the external drive to the computer while both the computer and drive are powered off. Turn the drive on first, and let it spin up and become ready. Then, power on the computer.

After the computer boots, see if the drive does one of the following:

1) Appears mounted on your desktop, or
2) Appears in Disk Utility, so that you can repair the drive (not the permissions, but a "repair disk") on the drive.

When you hard-powered off your mini, the drive wasn't unmounted properly and may have some form of light directory damage that can possibly be repaired through Disk Utility.
 
Hey,

I tried your method of rebooting the external drive, but still no icon on the desktop or in Disk Utility. However, when I checked Firewire bus under the System Profiler, an "unknown device" appears.

Any suggestions,
Thanks for your time.
 
Doctor X said:
[Stupid Question]Why does resetting the PRAM help in that situation[/Stupid Question]

--J.D.
Click to expand...

There are no stupid questions. With older Macs the Pram chip can become software corrupt and reseting it brings it back to factory state. It basically resets the USB/Firewire chip that controls the buses on the logic board. It typically resets bad ejections and things like that.
 
I reset the pram but still no access to the external drive. I also connected the external drive to my G3 laptop, but still no icon visible on the desktop.
 
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