Rebooted computer, now firewire drive's boot partition is gone...

Here's the story.
First, I run a Mac Mini (1.25Ghz with 1GB of RAM, booting from a 160GB firewire drive). Everything was running stellar until last night.
Got home from work last night, noticed my computer wasn't seeing the internet, despite the fact that my home network was functioning. So, I decided to reboot. After hitting reboot once, Tiger tells me it cannot reboot because something had not quite (something loader, I think, I forget). I wait a second, and hit "reboot" again. This time, it goes to blue screen with spinning wheel (not the mouse spinning wheel), and the screen goes back.
Computer powers down and comes back up. On startup, I get the grey screen with the "I can't find your OS" flashing icon.
I reboot the computer again, get the same thing. Load in my Tiger disc, boot from the CD. From the startup screen, I go to Disk Utility, and it shows that Disk Utility sees my firewire drive (it tells me the enclosures connection hardware information, and my hard drive disk size), but it does not show my partition where all my data, especially my boot data, resides.
Disk Utility will not let me repair or verify the hardware I see (since there's no partition it can see). I have DiskWarrior here at work, so I connected my hard drive to the computer here, started the firewire, and got the error "Disk Insertion - The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer. [Initialize] [Ignore] [Eject]".
I hit ignore, and ran DiskWarrior, and it cannot see the partition either, so it can't help me rebuild my directory structure.
So, what do I do now? I'm a Mac and PC guy, and an computer technician, so I know my way around, but I honestly get aggravated when just a simple reboot hoses my entire system. Kinda goofy, y'know? Anyway, any ideas would definitely be taken into account.
-Will
Mac Mini Mac OS X (10.4.3) Booting from firewire drive

Welcome to Apple Discussions!
Typically it is not a good idea to rely on an external drive for booting because you never know when cables or power to the external device might fail or the Firewire port might need resetting. Regardless, take a look at the hints at the beginning of my FAQ here:
http://www.macmaps.com/firewirebug2.html
And if none work you may need Prosoft Data Rescue to recover information off the drive if the data is not backed up. Note, any writing you do to that drive prior to attempted recovery will lessen your chances of recovery of information.
Disclaimer: Reference to links I make to my Macmaps.com website are a for your information only type reference. I do not get any profit from this page, and it is open to the public.

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Ok first of all here's my setup:
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boot with GRUB on a flash drive (since fakeraid doesn't support grub)
var and downloads/media folder on a 500GB WD Caviar drive
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grub
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Last edited by DarksideEE7 (2011-02-13 23:25:31)

Sorry, I forgot to mention that I tried to install GRUB from the GRUB shell in a live Arch USB. It failed on a few non-critical parts, and succeeded on the last part. I'm going to try again shortly, possibly I did something wrong. GRUB is able to find the stage files using:
#grub
grub>find /grub/stage1
grub> find /grub/stage1
(hd0,0)
(hd5,0)
grub>
(hd0,0) is the desired boot drive, while (hd5,0) is the current bootable flash drive with /boot and GRUB installed.
Here is the output of fdisk -l:
WARNING: GPT (GUID Partition Table) detected on '/dev/sde'! The util fdisk doesn't support GPT. Use GNU Parted.
Disk /dev/sde: 2000.4 GB, 2000398934016 bytes
256 heads, 63 sectors/track, 242251 cylinders, total 3907029168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sde1 1 3907029167 1953514583+ ee GPT
Disk /dev/sdb: 60.0 GB, 60022480896 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7297 cylinders, total 117231408 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xedb72db9
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 2048 206847 102400 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdb2 206848 117227519 58510336 7 HPFS/NTFS
Disk /dev/sdd: 40.0 GB, 40018599936 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4865 cylinders, total 78161328 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000
Disk /dev/sdd doesn't contain a valid partition table
Disk /dev/sdc: 40.0 GB, 40018599936 bytes
32 heads, 32 sectors/track, 76329 cylinders, total 78161328 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xb8372fcd
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 32 21484543 10742256 83 Linux
/dev/sdc2 21484544 156317695 67416576 83 Linux
Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders, total 976773168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x8497e059
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 2048 206847 102400 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 206848 42149887 20971520 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 42149888 976773167 467311640 83 Linux
Disk /dev/dm-0: 80.0 GB, 80035053568 bytes
32 heads, 32 sectors/track, 152654 cylinders, total 156318464 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 65536 bytes / 131072 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xb8372fcd
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/dm-0p1 32 21484543 10742256 83 Linux
Partition 1 does not start on physical sector boundary.
/dev/dm-0p2 21484544 156317695 67416576 83 Linux
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255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1337 cylinders, total 21484512 sectors
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Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 65536 bytes / 131072 bytes
Alignment offset: 49152 bytes
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255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 8392 cylinders, total 134833152 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 65536 bytes / 131072 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000
Disk /dev/dm-2 doesn't contain a valid partition table
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249 heads, 62 sectors/track, 1023 cylinders, total 15794176 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x8497e059
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdf1 * 62 200693 100316 83 Linux
/dev/sdf2 200694 15794175 7796741 83 Linux
I'm using dmraid, so just to be clear I've configured the raid using:
#modprobe dm_mod
#dmraid -ay
Then I saw the array stored in /dev/mapper/silXXXXX. I then created partitions for /boot, /, and home. At that time I was hoping to get GRUB working with the AUR package grub2-dmraid. I wasn't able to get it working for some time, so I just went ahead and installed boot and GRUB to a separate USB flash drive.
Here is the output of df -h:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 10M 268K 9.8M 3% /dev
/dev/mapper/sil_bgbgdjaddicbp1
11G 5.3G 4.3G 56% /
shm 6.0G 584K 6.0G 1% /dev/shm
/dev/mapper/sil_bgbgdjaddicbp2
64G 38G 23G 63% /home
/dev/sda1 95M 16M 75M 18% /boot
/dev/sda2 19G 142M 19G 1% /var
/dev/sda3 439G 148G 269G 36% /home/l33/Torrents
none 1000M 132K 1000M 1% /tmp
shm 6.0G 584K 6.0G 1% /dev/shm
/dev/sde1 1.8T 1.1T 665G 62% /mnt/Green
and cat /etc/mtab
proc /proc proc rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime
sys /sys sysfs rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime
udev /dev devtmpfs rw,nosuid,relatime,size=10240k,nr_inodes=1022975,mode=755
/dev/mapper/sil_bgbgdjaddicbp1 / ext4 rw,noatime,barrier=1,stripe=32,data=ordered
devpts /dev/pts devpts rw 0 0
shm /dev/shm tmpfs rw,nosuid,nodev 0 0
/dev/mapper/sil_bgbgdjaddicbp2 /home ext4 rw,noatime 0 0
/dev/sda1 /boot ext2 rw 0 0
/dev/sda2 /var reiserfs rw,noatime 0 0
/dev/sda3 /home/l33/Torrents ext4 rw,noatime 0 0
none /tmp tmpfs rw,nosuid,nodev,noatime,size=1000M,mode=1777 0 0
shm /dev/shm tmpfs rw,nosuid,nodev,size=6G 0 0
rpc_pipefs /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs rpc_pipefs rw 0 0
nfsd /proc/fs/nfsd nfsd rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0
/dev/sde1 /mnt/Green ext4 rw 0 0
Also I don't have a /proc/mdstat. That's only for mdadm RAID setups, right? It's been quite some time since I've used mdadm so I can't remember.
EDIT:
So I booted into a live Arch USB and entered the grub shell. I ran:
#grub
grub> root (hd3,0)
Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
grub> setup (hd3)
Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists.....no
Checking if "/grub/stage1 exists.......yes
Checking if "/grub/stage2 exists.......yes
Checking if "/grub/e2fs_stage1_5 exists....yes
Running "embed /grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd3)".....25 sectors are embedded.
succeeded
Running "install /grub/stage1 (hd3) (hd3))1+25 p (hd3,0)/grub/stage2 /grub/menu.lst".......succeeded
Done.
Last time I recall more errors than this, then it reporting that one was a non-critical error, so I think the problem may be solved. More to come.
Last edited by DarksideEE7 (2011-02-13 23:18:44)

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Hello and Welcome to Apple Discussions.
I would
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Paul Roese1 wrote:
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When I'm booted off the otherwise flawlessly performing for a while now 10.4.3 partition I've been using for a while now, firewire drives fail to show up in either System Profiler or Disk Utility.
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Okay, good idea ... I had checked all the logs ...
sudo egrep -ri "firewire|1394|seagate" /Library/Logs /var/log
... returned two instances of sudo logging me running this command, and one instance of IOFireWireLib mentioned in a non-pertinent SystemUIServer crash log from September 2004, when I had 10.3.5 on the partition.
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FireWire (LYNX) built-in rev 2 now active, GUID 0050e4ff fe6e4808; max speed s400.
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Extension "com.apple.driver.Oxford_Semi" has no kernel dependency.
Extension "com.apple.iokit.IOFireWireSerialBusProtocolTransport" has no kernel dependency.
Extension "com.apple.driver.LSIFW500" has no kernel dependency.
Extension "com.apple.iokit.IOFireWireSerialBusProtocolTransport" has no kernel dependency.
Extension "com.apple.driver.initioFWBridge" has no kernel dependency.
Extension "com.apple.iokit.IOFireWireSerialBusProtocolTransport" has no kernel dependency.
Extension "com.apple.driver.StorageLynx" has no kernel dependency.
Extension "com.apple.iokit.IOFireWireSerialBusProtocolTransport" has no kernel dependency.
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Rebooted computer, now firewire drive's boot partition is gone...

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