USB drives missing

S

slaz55

Registered
A strange thing happened last week, I unmounted my 3 usb external drives (I was going on vacation and just didn't want people to snoop around) and when I came back I couldn't remount these drives. The drives show up in Disk Utilities and I can verify or repair them but it shows no icons and 0 files. I've restarted several times and disconnected and reconnected the drives with no luck. Also I can do a search in Spotlight and it will show files on the drives but with generic icons and I can't launch them. Is this a finder issue or sharing thing going on? I don't want to reinitialize them because of the content I have on them. Any information would be greatly appreciated.
 
Have you installed any updates to your computers since you last mounted these drives? Have you tried mounting them one at a time? Has anyone had physical access to them while you were away?
 
To my best knowledge no. I did let someone login as a guest but he had no admin privileges. I was wondering if its just the finder prefs, it does see the drives in Disk Utilities also I used TechTools and it had no problem seeing the drives.
 
Let's try this again. Before I left for vacation I set my 3 external USB drive permissions to "No Access" and unmounted the drives, I also set up a guest account for anyone to access the computer while I was away. After I returned I could not access the drives (logged in as admin) or see the drives on the desktop. Disk Utilities sees the drives and can verify them or repair them. Tech Tools sees them and can do any tests I choose. I feel this is a permissions issue not a disk problem, but I do not know how to reset the permissions if I can't access the drives. I can recover the data with Tech Tools but this seems extreme and maybe I'm just doing something stupid!
 
1)plug one of the drives into the USB port
2)open terminal.app and type cd /Volumes, press the return button
3)type ls -lai, press return again

Does the drive show up in the list?

If not, You may need to reset the USB ports - with all peripheral devices removed except your mouse and keyboard, shutdown the computer and unplug it from the electrical outlet (also remove the battery if it is a laptop computer), wait at least 20 minutes, and plug in/power up the computer...
 
I tried the terminal command and it only returned my local drive. I then shut down and disconnected from power with no luck. This has to be a priviledge issue, but the drives should show up somewhere.
 
If you have another computer to plug the USB drive(s) into, try that and see what happens.
 
You cannot reset the drive privileges until you
manage to get the drive mounted - either set up
a new account on the affected computer and see
if the drive(s) will show up while logged in as the
new user or use another computer.

If you can successfully mount a drive and get it to show
up in terminal, you can use the chmod command to reset
the permissions.

chmod 755 "drive name"
 
I ended up booting from the 10.4 install disc and all drives showed up. I had a drive that wasn't too full so I recovered 1 drive to another and reinitialized and renamed the disk, on reboot the initialized drive showed up. To me this doesn't seem like a very good way to retore permissions. I have one more drive that I cannot see but I can't move the files because I don't have enough disk space on any other drives. There has to be a better way to reset the drives!!!
 
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