How do I repair a hard drive that was being written to while my MacBook Air crashed? (Drive will not mount)

My external backup drive will not mount. I have tried to mount it in Disk Utility via the app and the command prompt but the attempt times out. Any suggestions?
I backed up my HD the day before dropping off my Mac for repair, and then tried again just before going to my appointment. During this last and final backup my Macbook Air crashed. I have since discovered that the drive will no longer mount, likely due to the crash that occured during the last attempted backup. I am unsure if the drive can be repaired.
My logic board was short circuiting some where that controls the headphone jack. Initially this prevented me from using the jack but eventually caused my mac to crash several times before I brought it in for repair. I believe that it is the this crashing that is responsible for my back up not being accessible but that my data may still be intact.
Thanks for any help you may have!

If possible, attach it to another Mac and see if it is recognized in Disk Utility. If so, run Disk Utility>First Aid. If not, the HDD may be damaged.
Ciao.

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External Hard Drive will not mount after upgrading to Yosemite

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External Hard drive will not mount on Macbook Air (mid-2011) OSX 10.9.4

Hello Everyone!
Needs some help resolving this issue. External hard drive (Toshiba v63600-C) will not mount anymore on my mothers-in-law's macbook air. She notice this problem starting on the Aug 6th. You can see it in the Disk Utility but is not mounted. I can get the her ext hard drive to mount on my Macbook Pro with no problem. I also tried my personal ext hard drive (Seagate) on her Macbook Air and it will not mount. Not sure what is going on here. Any help is appreciated in resolving this issue.
Disk Utility
Mount Point : Not mounted Capacity : 1 TB (1,000,096,367,104 Bytes)
Format : Windows NT Filesystem (Tuxera NTFS) Available : -
Owners Enabled : - Used : -
Number of Folders : - Number of Files : -
Actions Taken So Far:
1) Confirmed "external disk" is selected under Finder's Preference
2) Reset PRAM
3) Ran Verify Disk and Repair Disk under Disk Utility with no change.
4) Tried manually mounting disk in Disk Utility but get "Mount Failed" error

You may believe this is Apple's problem but I just like Baltwo have had absolutely no problems with any of my Firewire drives in Lion. So unless you can come up with much stronger evidence to the contrary, I doubt that your feeling are going to carry any weight at all.
Allan

Hard Drive will not Mount

I have a Seagate Barracuda 1.5 Gig installed in a MacPro as an additional drive and as of today the drive will not mount. Yersterday I noticed it ejected itself; I immediately rebooted and started to download the data to another drive but it ejected itself again after about 25% complete copy. I attempted to "verify drive" with Disk Utility but it was not listed. This morning it will will not mount. The drive is still under warranty so replacement is not an issue. Where I am at a loss is recovering the data. I fired up time machine and there was no data from this drive backed up (Bay 2). I checked the preferrences and the drive was not "excluded". So, I'm at a loss as to how or if I can recovery any data. I removed the drive from the MacPro and fired it up in a docking station (SATA) without results; still will not mount. Is recovering my data beyond hope? Any ideas or tips would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Koyangie

Hatter,
Tried Recovery Mode without success. Although the drive appears in Disk Utility I get an error after selecting Restore! If I click on the Image icon it will not list the contents.
There is perhaps .6 TB on this driver (images). After I posted and received yourt reply I took another look at my Time Machine and found all my data under Shared. What a relief.
Thanks for your advice. I'll return the drive to Seagate for a replacement. Hopefull I will be able to format it before sending it back.
Koyangie

Hard drive will not mount - SMART STATUS "not supported"

I was in the process of "sanitizing" an iMac G5 last night by erasing the data with Disk Utility and the hard drive is not not recognized...and some alarming noises periodically come from the drive.
Is there something else I should try to determine if the drive can be saved? (never had trouble before.)
Failing that, how do I determine which drive I should order as a replacement (250 gig,) and from where?
Thanks!

If you are hearing noises from the HD, then I suggest that oyou start backing up.
Which "model" & "generation" G5 iMac do you have?
Need this info so that the knowledgeable users can provide you with the proper troubleshooting solution(s).
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301724-en How to identify your iMac
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.4/en/mh355.html Getting information about your computer
You can have this info displayed on the bottom of every post by going to 'My Settings' which is located in the column on the right under your name, and filling in the information asked for.
Thank you
If you have the iSight model, you will need to take your computer to your nearest AASP. The iSight models (except for RAM installation) are not user repairable & will void the warranty if attempted.

Hard drive will not mount shows up in Disk Utility

I have an external drive with a bootable OS X 10.6.8. I was in a transition between building up a SSD swapped drive. The SSD is installed in the CPU box but I have my old installation running from an external.
I have several external hard drives. They are all Firewire. Some have USB 3.0 and or eSATA options but my MacMini only talks to Firewire and USB 2.0.
I understand that you daisy chain Firewire drives and turn them on and off in sequence as they fall from the CPU box/case.
Firewire is a power source. I run the external with the OS using an AC adapter but one Firewire drive is powered through Firewire.
I have had as many as 4 external drives running along with the internal drive without a glitch while I was reorganizing files.
Today I booted off the external drive. It was running fine. I turned on one Firewire drive (the one that runs on Firewire power). That drive stumbled. I recognized the sound when there is an interruption in power. This cause the external boot drive to stall. I had to force a reboot.
Now the external boot drive will not boot up. It does not mount but Disk Utility sees it. The drive itself is bright and clear in Disk Utility but the partition (single) is faded out. I can run Verify and repair in DU. DU says it doesn't see anything to repair. It will not mount on its own or when I click the Mount button in DU. It does not produce an icon on the Desktop (because it is not mounting).
I also have SpeedTools. But although it sees the drive I cannot do anything with it. None of its tools run more than a spli second before they fail.
This drive has USB 3.0 and I see everything through USB that I see through Firewire. Connecting the other way did not get around the problem.
Of course I will buy an AC adapter for every external drive and never run them using Firewire again but the horse is out of the barn.
I have the original installation disks and could run the Archive and Install option but it would require physically swapping drives with the internal. I'd like to avoid it if possible. It is a MacMini and tedious.
Any suggestions?

I took the problematic hard drive and installed it in my Mac Mini so I could attempt a Safe Boot and then Archive and Install if necessary.
Safe Mode didn't work. The drive produced the circle with a slash symbol.
I reset the PRAM which was part of a list of steps to work through I found created by Apple Support.
I was able to boot up to Verbose Mode and view the text of the boot process. I wrote it all down. I can answer questions about the content better than typing it all out exactly. It includes, "...journal magic is bad..." "...failed to open..." and ends with "...cannot mount root, errno = 19"
I attempted Archive and Install however when it went to show what target drives were available it was a blank box and all buttons were grayed out.
I rebooted and opened Disk Utility from the DVD. The drive appeared the same with the top main line bright and the partitioned volume faded. Still was unable to mount. I ran Verify and this time a red line of text appeared "Invalid content in Journal" and at the end I ran Repair. When running I could read line by line and at one point it showed "checking volume information" then the following line "Repairing volume" the following line "Rechecking volume" more line of checking then it ended with "The volume was repaired successfully."
It still would not mount. I ran Verify again and again said "Invalid content in Journal" and this time it stopped midway saying "The volume was found corrupt and needs to be repaired. Error: This disk needs to be repaired. Click Repair Disk."
I clicked Repair and it ended with The vol. was repaired successfully."
Still unable to mount I began repeating Repair over and over. Each time it found something to repair and ended with a success message. After several more Repairs I tried Verify and it stopped midway saying to Repair the disk.
Question: Does running Repair multiple times continue to correct bits and pieces little by little or is this a generic message and we should treat it as a problem Disk Utility cannot pinpoint and is just beating its head against the wall?
The step by step instructions I downloaded mentioned running Repair more than once but it did not say that running it 20 times would erode some problems and eventually lead to a fully repaired disk (if the problem was something DU could take care of in the first place). At this point I have run Repair about 20 times total with a series of 10 back to back skipping Verify. I keep seeing the lines about invalid content in a journal and that it repaired something successfully. Yet I still cannot mount the disk.

Hard drive will not mount after optical drive upgrade

I recently performed an optical drive install. Had to remove the hard drive bays (I use three hard drives - Luckily, 2 run OSX).
I carefully removed all three drive bays and the empty bay. When I inserted the drives into the computer I had changed the position, swapping one OSX drive with a different one and reversing the drive bays. On restart, the computer started on the drive I had not selected for startup and I received an error message stating the other drive could not mount and it gave three options (Initialize - Ignore and Eject).
I can see the drive in Disk Utility and repair the permissions (it's also located in the System Profile).
I tried a few things I read in the community using various Terminal commands but was unsuccessful.
(Let me point out that I recently switched from a PPC G5 to MacPro and swapped the drives from PPC into MacPro and all has been fine until I removed changed their positions in the bays)
Any suggestions/help would be greatly appreciated.

I would recommend you reformat your drives that you brought over, and if possible put in a Firewie case.
Swapping drives will normally not matter but you should use Startup Disk to reset the default after using Option key the first time.
Putting in an optical device shouldn't require removing the drives to get the cage loose and let you put in a 2nd superdirve.
G5 used APM partition map, Intel Macs use EFI and requie GPT/GUID.
A drive with just data should not matter but that is not fool-proof either.
A drive iwth the system from a G5 though can.
During startup the boot process scans all volumes and looks for systems and mountable volumes.
Pull all the drives except the one with OS X that you were using, and put that in bay #1.
I've moved arrays between bays and that never "broke" the array or had trouble mounting and using (even moving to ODD ports).

External Hard drive will not mount on desktop

I have a 17" Powerbook G4 that has replaced a broken iBook G4. I've been using a Western Digital MyBook Pro Edition as a secondary drive for my multimedia as well as my iTunes Library. It worked fine on the old iBook.
When I plug it into the Powerbook, using either USB2 or Firewire 800, it will not mount to the desktop. It DOES however appear in the System Profiler as "External HD Button and Lights". The drive is formatted for FAT32 and works fine on my Windows XP desktop machine, so I know the drive functions mechanically. A different hard drive, a Maxtor mounts to the desktop fine using USB2, so it isn't a bus issue.
This is driving me nuts. I LOVE this computer, but I have WAY more invested in music than the cost of the computer.
Thanks in advance.
Message was edited by: hempomatic

It took a while to figure it out but apparently there was a conflict with bluetooth. I disabled it and all is well.

Hard drive will not mount with 10.4 but will mount with 10.3

I have a G4 powerbook running on 10.4.11. There is a western digital my book external drive hooked up to the USB port. I have two partitions on it. I tried to change the group settings to read write and got an error saying I did not have permission. Now the first partition will mount, but the second which I tried to change will not mount.
Disk utility sees the drive but it is grayed out. DiskWarrior sees the drive.
I dragged out my old G3 running 10.3.9 and plugged it in. Works great. The disk drive partition mounts and all of the files are there. What do I need to do to get 10.4.11 to mount the disk partition?
The external drive is a Western Digital My Book 250G divided equally into two partitions. The partitions are in Mac extended format.

I'm having pretty much the same problem... Have a WD 500 GB external attached via USB. I can't say for sure that the WD caused this (wasn't paying close enough attention), but I've noticed that my own MacBook HD is no longer mounted. I can't seem to find anyway to accomplish this either. I've booted from another volume to run Disk Utility (repair/verify). I rebooted with the MacBook startup drive and still, no HD. And NOW I can't see the bootable partition I made on the WD external. What?
I feel like the opposite of a nerd, cuz I'm just scratching my head at this point. Oh yeah, and running 10.4.11...

My external hard drive will not mount on the desktop?

My external hard drive no longer mounts on my desktop, the hard drive has been checked & is working-has anyone ideas?

Hello cuckoo55,
Thanks for using Apple Support Communities.
For more information on this, take a look at:
Mac OS X v10.6: How to show your hard drive icon on the desktop
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3746
In the Finder, choose Preferences from the Finder menu.
Click the General icon on the toolbar.
Select "Hard disks" in the "Show these items on the desktop:" section.
Close the Finder Preferences window.
Best of luck,
Mario

USB2 Hard Drives will not mount under 10.4.11

I have a 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MBP, with 2 GB of RAM. Using the 10.4.9 OS and earlier, I had no problems at all mounting and using an external USB hard drive that I use at both work and home. When I updated to 10.4.10, the drive stopped mounting, so I took it and the computer in to the Genius Bar. The only solution he could think of was to roll my OS back to 10.4.9, which worked immediately. The drive started booting again without any problems.
I took my MBP in for an unrelated issue and the Genius at the Genius Bar (same guy who rolled it back, I think) suggested I upgrade and that the USB mounting issue wasn't a problem any more. I upgraded to 10.4.11 and once again, my USB hard drive won't mount.
I have no problems getting it to mount on my XP machine at work and our G4 Mac Mini at home has no trouble with the hard drive either, so I'm positive the drive is fine. The problem is with the OS update to 10.4.11.
My iPod mounts just fine (which is also USB2) and my thumb drives seem to work just fine, but I do have an older drive that has stopped working. Like my external HD, it mounts just fine on other computers.
Does anyone have a fix? The Genius I spoke with when this problem first started suggested I ditch the drive and get a Firewire one, which is a nice thought, but I shouldn't have to replace hardware that works just fine, because something in the OS updates isn't working. Do I have to roll back to 10.4.9 again?
I have to say, this is a bit frustrating, as I already dealt with the problem, was assured it was fixed, and then ran into it again.
Robb

I recently had a similar issue (different conditions, same issue) and here is what I posted, maybe it can help you:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1638087&tstart=0
I didn't mention another possible solution mentioned somewhere else: replace certain kernel extensions in your 10.4.10 or 11 installation with those present in 10.4.9: "IOHIDFamily.kext", "IOUSBFamily.kext" and "IOUSBMassStorageClass.kext" (using Pacifist).
An update to this post: now my external disk doesn't mount again. I'm pretty sure the disk is OK, as it mounts in different machines and it works fine thru the USB 1 interface (keyboard hub).
I tried the solution's point two (deleting kext caches) and it worked pretty fine... Until the next restart. Doesn't work anymore. USB Prober (point three) no go. I think I'll try replacing the kernel extensions. It was reported as successful, but I'm currently running 10.5.4 and I don't feel inclined to use 10.5.3. I would use better 10.4.9 ones, which were mostly reported as OK, but doesn't seem a pretty safe operation.
Anyway, my external HD was working fine under 10.5.4 in a different machine and doesn't work in this new one (also 10.5.4), so I'm not sure about the results, but I won't trash this external HD, as it works fine in every other machine except for this one
Already many posts regarding USB issues, I hope Apple fixes this ASAP, as most of peripherals today are purely USB-based. I think this issue regards usually to external HDs. Surely some simple lines of code mangled across the various OS updates

HARD DRIVES WILL NOT MOUNT AT ALL

Ok my Lacie HDs will not mount at all anymore through my fire wire 400 ports. i have been back and forth with Apple and Lacie with this issue for months and nobody can find the issue. Heres the deal. When I bring my HDs to the Apple store and they plug them in to another computer they mount just fine. So I brought my whole system into the Apple store and ofcourse my HDs would not mount on my computer. So they tried to mount the HDs they had and they worked just fine. Mounting on USB works just fine also. So Apple tested my firewire ports and according to Apple my firewire ports are operating fine. But something is not operating fine. The tech at Apple told me that since I have 2 Lacie HDs plugged in on the same firewire bus its possible that my Mac (G4) can not tell the difference between the 2 drives and that would make them not mount at all. He also thought it would be a good idea for me to get a firewire card so my drives would be seperated and they can work on completely on 2 different busses. I have tried everything you could think of to try and get these drives to mount. I have tried to mount them one at a time, I have tried different power supplies, and firewire cords, nothing is working. Help me out..

Philip,
I have had trouble with USB lacie drives in the past. Some people swear by them, but I personally avoid them as well as maxtor.
sounds like you're stuck with them since they are that old. I would pursue something with Lacie. If every other hdd connects fine - except them, and Apple has tested the ports = seems like a problem with the drives. I'd get the data off them and see if you can't get lacie to help out.
not a solution - good luck!
rob

External hard drive will not mount nor repair... ='(

My internal hard drive was failing, so I backed up all of my data onto a 500GB WD Passport external hard drive and ordered a warranty replacement. Yesterday I received the replacement and went to restore my data. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to restore it and after about 45GB, my computer completely froze. I restarted and tried again, this time the same thing happened at the same point. I restarted, but this time it would not boot off of the external HD. I booted off of another external HD and ran "Repair Disk" in Disk Utility. It took forever, but when it finished it said something like I need to backup, erase, and restore. The problem is that I can't access any of my data on the drive!
Is there any program I can use to repair it? Or is there any way to force it to mount?

Varlos wrote:
My internal hard drive was failing, so I backed up all of my data onto a 500GB WD Passport external hard drive and ordered a warranty replacement. Yesterday I received the replacement and went to restore my data. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to restore it and after about 45GB, my computer completely froze.
I won't try to answer any of your questions, but I do have a set of my own: How did you initialize that replacement drive? Did you set the partition map scheme to "GUID Partition Table"? Did you format the volume as "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)"?

External Hard Drives will not Mount

I have a WD & LaCie external hard drives in my iMac G5 they have been working fine until I started using the new Time Machine program. Now the drive show up in disk utility but not on the desktop. Disk utility has been no help in repairing them and in its log states " Invalid content in Journal " .
How do I get my drives back ?

I did an archive reinstall of Leopard and I still had my problem, so I schleped it down to the Apple store and for the life of me We could not make it happen, drives shoed up fine and worked fine. I think I have a bad FW port that is intermittant but for now I cannot have them fix something that seems to work...
I dont thisnk we have the same problem, because when I had my drives not showing up on the desktop, they were not showing up in Disk Utilitiy either.
Is there data on those drives that you must have? If not I would try reformatting them with Disk Utility ("erase") and see if they reappear. If there is data on them, I would try running a better utility program such as DiskWarrior, I think you can run it on external Disks to rebuild the directory. The problem is that the present version, 4.0 is not compatible with Leopard. The new one is out soon if not already for Leopard. There is no guarantee that that will work, but may be worth a try.
http://www.alsoft.com/
roger

External hard Drive will not mount via firewire tpo my Powerbook G4

I have a Powerbook G4 1.5, 2 Gb Ram and an 80 Gb Hard Drive. Well my problem is, I went and purchased a Western Digital External Hard Drive. The box states that this hard drive is compatible for both Windows and Mac. But for some reason I can't get the external hard drive to mount via the firewire. However it will mount by using the USB.
So can someone please provide some troubleshooting tips on how I can get this external hard drive to mount?
Thanks

hi there,
in your case, your drive is probably bad because the copy was interrupted. your hard drive may be finished, but more likely, just the file structure is damaged and/or you have bad sectors.
you have a few options:
*if you don't need the data back:*
• see if the drive appears in disk utility and try to erase/reformat (make sure to zero out data to avoid bad sectors)
• if it doesn't appear, try a pc. it won't recognize it, but it may allow you to reformat/initialize it. then, connect back into mac (which will recognize a pc formatted drive) and reformat as mac os x extended (journaled).
*if you need the data back:*
• try a program like data rescue II, file salvage, or boomerang data recovery first to recover the data
• see if the drive appears in disk utility and try to repair disk
• if that doesn't work, try disk warrior and/or drive genius
• if you aren't successful, you may want to try a professional data recovery service (or me first, to ensure that you actually need someone as high tech as drive savers)
• if you are successful and are able to recover the data, then erase the drive (zero out data) and then move the data back, to ensure you're working off a well formatted drive.
fyi, if your computer freezes in the future, be sure to try appleoptionesc first and force quitting the problem application. if that doesn't work, try controloption+appleeject (shutdown) and/or optionappleeject (restart). if those doesn't work, in this situation, the next best move would probably have been turning off the power on the hard drive. if that doesn't unfreeze the system in a few minutes, then hold the power button.
hope this helps,
brian
corewerkz/briancometa.com/

How do I repair a hard drive that was being written to while my MacBook Air crashed? (Drive will not mount)

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