Cannot mount external drive

I can't mount my TOSHIBA 1.5 TB external drive on my 15' Macbook Pro Retina.
What should I do?

download Tinker Tool, if you don't have it already.
Open Tinker Tool, under finder > finder options
select "show hidden and system files", relaunch finder.
Close Tinker Tool, using finder navigate to /Volumes directory.
If there is any left over references to your USB drive, remove them
(drag them to the trash).
Open Terminal.app
at the prompt:
sudo disktool -r
(press return, enter your admin password, press return again)
should give the message: Refreshing Disk Arbitration ...
close terminal
Kj

Similar Messages

Cannot mount external drives

Hi all!
I have an 2010 imac i5 32GB RAM, running on 10.9.2.
All of a sudden my machine does not mount ANY extrenal hard drive. It recognises them in Disk Utility, but they appear greyed and cannot be mounted. Not even disk repair. Last week though the drives were mounting on the system without any problems.
Yesterday I have upgraded the OS to 10.9.2. (from 10.6.8). Still the same problem, the drives are recognisable in DU but cannot be mounted.
All of the disks I've tried are NTFS format (originally formatted on a pc). Funny thing is I have VMware Fusion on my mac runing a virtual Windows 7 pc. Windows do recognise the drives and mount them without problem, but not the mac.
Also note that I'm using Tuxera NFS to work with these drives with no problem so far, until now.
Also checked the cables, I'm connecting the drives though USB ports, they are ok.
Any suggestions?

just guessing you are using USB to mount the external. you may need to use two usb ports to mount the drive. that means a cable with two usb connectors which should provide enough power to the external.

Cannot mount external drive on network when no user logged in

We have a few workstations on our network that have multiple accounts for users in order to preserve preferences, etc. An external hard drive attached to the each workstation, holds work done on that station by the different users. When all users are logged out, the external drive does not appear as a mountable device when trying to log into the workstation from another computer; only the internal drives are seen and mountable.
Is there a way to make the external drive visible and available for mounting over the network when no user is logged in? The external drive is set to ignore permissions for that drive in the get info window.
Additionally, when a user is logged in to the workstation and someone tries to log in over the network to access the external drive, the drive is sometimes available over the network and other times not. What causes this inconsistency?
thx, j

You really want to format it HFS+ wiyh GUID Partition scheme to ensure your data transfers correctly...
How to format your disks...
http://www.kenstone.net/fcphomepage/partitioningtiger.html
(On IntelMac the Drive it needs the GUID Partitioning scheme mentioned at the bottom.)
Not sure if that'll make it see it or not, but your data will be better. Besides, you should be able to install to that then & maybe boot from it to ease matters.

Brand new iMac 23.GHz Intel Core i5. Mounts external drive for time machine, then dismounts after backup is complete.

brand new iMac 23.GHz Intel Core i5. Mounts external drive for time machine, then dismounts after backup is complete.

The warranty entitles you to complimentary phone support for the first 90 days of ownership.
If you bought the product in the U.S. directly from Apple (not from a reseller), you have 14 days from the date of delivery in which to exchange or return it for a refund. In other countries, the return policy may be different. If you bought from a reseller, its return policy applies.

Cannot mount external USB drive with FDisk_partition_scheme

Due to some recent mac issues in my lab, we updated one of the computers to Maverick 10.9.4 from Snow Leopard 10.6.8 yesterday. Anyhow, this seems to have erased the ability of the mac to read or mount several identical USB drives with the NTFS format (WD My Passport Ultra 500GB USB3.0). It could do it yesterday when it was OSX 10.6.8, but not today (OSX 10.9.4). The drives still work fine on other OSX 10.6.8, Windows 8.1 and Ubuntu 14.04 computers (this is appears to be a problem with the Maverick 10.9.4 operating system itself, rather than the flash drives which work flawlessly with every other computer I've tried). I want to remove data from the computer to create backups on the USB drives (no, I don't want to create an online backup or buy a new set of USB drives).
diskutil can see the drives, but cannot verify or repair them as they lack a GUID (GPT) partition scheme. I'm assuming this is the root of the problem. Manually mounting the drives does not work. Installing the ntfs-3g driver also did not work (I was using this to write to the NTFS drives until we upgraded OS's). Installing the WD Passport drivers for OSX also did not work. How do I get the mac to mount these drives?
I could reformat one USB drive and then copy to the others, but this would be extremely inconvenient and take days of copying files back and forth (and would prefer to fix the mac rather than go through this with every NTFS drive I own). If I did this, the FAT32 hard drive format would not be suitable, as format is unable to handle the extremely large sequencing datasets I need to transfer. I'm not super familiar with hard drive formats, but in the event we cannot get Maverick to actually work could someone possibly suggest a format able to handle large file sizes (the largest file I need to move is ~60GB) and be compatible with Windows 8.1 / OSX 10.9.4 / Ubuntu 14.04 as well?
Another workaround I thought of would be just to install an Ubuntu partition on the mac and get the files off through the Linux install. Which is also inconvenient, but would probably be faster than trying to reformat the drives and copy everything over onto them again given the amount of data I want to transfer.
Unrelated, but is there any way to view files and folders in the OSX root directory besides through Terminal? It seems like this functionality was also removed when we "upgraded" from Snow Leopard. (At this point, if it were up to me I would wipe all of the macs we own and replace them with Ubuntu... even the most minor of tasks always require some sort of workaround with them... at my wits end here ).

Yeah this definitely appears to be a problem specifically with this mac. It's been having all sorts of weird problems lately, and we figured that upgrading to Maverick might fix them (but instead we got new problems).
To give an update on this, I ended up reformatting one of the drives to HFS+ and disabled journaling. It now recognizes the drive again, and I'm pulling the files off that way. I looked at exFAT, but it looks like HFS+ has much better Linux support (Windows is read-only but that's only a minor annoyance, as the algorithms to process the data only run on UNIX machines anyways). It's a shame I couldn't keep using NTFS (had to copy over literally EVERYTHING again...) but whatever. Again, no solution for the issue (where this mac can't read NTFS drives).
@rkaufmann87 - To give a bit more explanation, we recently had to disable online backups because apparently the sheer amount of data causes Time Machine to freeze the computer and fail every time it has a scheduled backup (original issue we thought that upgrading to Maverick would solve... didn't work). The hard drive has been having a lot of issues when it begins to reach max capacity as well. So I am pulling off all of my files to external hard drives and deleting the local copy before we attempt to back up online again. And the data would probably take me a year and a lot of money to recreate (for the curious, it's high throughput sequencing data). I'm choosing not to take any chances as a result.

10.9: cannot mount westerndigital drive usb3 external, but in 10.8 yes

please why is my text shown on white background? can i change this?
i could not mount my 2 external wd drives (mypassport 2,5" 2TB)
(USB3.0) since install of 10.9 on my 2 brand new macs. (imac 27" i5 late 2013 and mbair i7 mid 2013)
before, with 10.8 it worked fine!
i thought the wd drive is faulty, so i got a new one by warranty, and sent the "old" back. it took only 5 days to get the swap by wd.
i could not mount the new drive either under 10.9
but today i installed techtool pro 7.0.2, did nothing but a reboot and after that, i plugged it into my imac with 10.9, it mounted correctly on my imac, the first time ever! and showed a techtool symbol as drive symbol instead of the orange colored usb symbol.
appearantly techtool pro 7.0.2 installed something into 10.9 which helps the system mount discs?
- i never did lock the drive with the wd security app
- before that, i tried to remove all wd related stuff and uninstalled every single wd app and driver, still no mount !
- before that, apple disctools under 10.9 did not show the drives in the left column, as no other harddisc app did. (drive genius)
- i can mount both drives on the old mbair with 10.8, my wife´s mac
- wd drive utilites would show the disc, but not mount, if i tried to format it, it showed an error after 1min: cannot format disc,
as it cannot be mounted. (or so..)
- now, after install of techtool pro 7.0.2, when i plug the drive into my imac, it is mounted correctly, but there is
always another volume mounted by default "wd drive unlock volume" which says "your wd drive is not locked, so you can not unlock it)
weird?
i still cannot mount the wd drive on my new macbook air with 10.9,
etre check lists as difference:
imac:
Kernel Extensions:
com.wdc.driver.USB.64.10.9 (1.0.1 - SDK 10.9) (today mount possible for the first time since weeks)
macbook air:
no wd driver at all (and no mount possible)
any idea?
thanks
Message was edited by: peppermint

first, you should try reinstalling 10.5.4. download the [combo update|http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/macosx_updates/macosx1054com boupdate.html] and run it. If that doesn't fix the issue, you can use full system restore from TM to go back to a time before the troubles started. to do that boot from the leopard install dvd, once past the language screen go to the Utilities menu at the top and choose "restore from backup".

Cannot mount external USB drive

During a recent update I remember pacman asking about replacing some package with another package to handle disk mounting. I think the added package was "gnome-volume-manager" or "gnome-disk-utility" (or both). I didn't see any postings describing problems with doing this, so went ahead and allowed the change. Now it's a few days later and I find I cannot mount an external USB hard drive anymore. It has an entry in fstab, and although I have tried mutiple edits of the device to associate the drive with, nothing works.
The disk used to associate with /dev/sdb1. Now this device no longer exists. Here is what has happened to my /dev/sd* entries:
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 0 2009-10-27 11:08 /dev/sda
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 3 2009-10-27 11:08 /dev/sda3
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 1 2009-10-27 11:08 /dev/sda1
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 2 2009-10-27 11:08 /dev/sda2
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 4 2009-10-27 11:08 /dev/sda4
brw-rw---- 1 root storage 8, 16 2009-11-04 13:00 /dev/sdb
Trying to force association with "/dev/sdb" "/dev/sda5" (or some other number not in use) or "sdb1" (or 2,3,4, whatever) just yields "special device ... does not exist".
Does anybody know how to deal with this?
Does anybody know what package(s) I replaced when the update in question took place? I think I'd like to reverse whatever happened.
And on another note, I think another gnome-based package also recently replaced a package relating to printing. Yesterday I discovered I have printing problems too:
At first there were no printers found. Although cups is supposed to start according to rc.conf, cupsd was not running. I started it manually and then all the printers showed up again, though I cannot print duplex (again, worked fine before). What is going on with these gnome packages?!? Anyone know which package(s) I need to remove (and then what to put back) to make printing work like it used to also?
thanks much.

oddly, fdisk -l shows nothing, even for disks which are mounted (eg. /dev/sda4). when I insert a standard USB thumb drive, the following show up properly:
brw-rw---- 1 root storage 8, 32 2009-11-05 10:50 /dev/sdc
brw-rw---- 1 root storage 8, 33 2009-11-05 10:50 /dev/sdc1
and I am able to mount and use the drive as usual.
The external drive I've been struggling with has xfs for filesystem type. After using the thumb drive, /dev/sdb showed up spontaneously, but no /dev/sdb1. attempting to mount gives:
mount: /dev/sdb is not a valid block device
or
mount: special device /dev/sdb1 does not exist
depending on which device is specified in fstab.
I am thinking that either a) my ability to mount xfs filesystems has somehow been hosed, or b) there is something wrong with drive, which must have spontaneously failed very recently (it is less than 1 yr old, but this happens from time to time).
If the drive is okay, any ideas about how mounting xfs filesystems could have been broken by recent upgrades?
btw, the fstab entry (which worked fine until a couple days ago) is: /dev/sdb1 /mnt/external_1 xfs rw,noauto,user,exec 0 0

How to recover data from non-mounting external drive?

OK- here is the pinch:
I have a Western Digital My Book 500GB Studio Edition which, though visible in Disk Utility, fails to mount, even when I try to do so via Disk Utility. I have tried all the usual- unplugged, repowered-up, changed the order of Mac to external drive power-up/plug in etc etc. It will not mount, end of.
Then I changed the housing, in case the issue was with that. No change.
Then I had a friend use his PC's software to recover the data and he pulled off what appears to be ALL of it (it was close on being the 500GB as the drive was full) but it is not usuable and the Final Cut Pro and iMovie files I am needing to recover, appear to have been "downgraded" to MPEGs and MP4s (how IS that even possible?!) with a few MOVs of which the bulk are unreadable. Oddly the clips are transitions only- no full three and a half minute (most of them are of music, songs of about that length) clips ever.
So- is there any chance that I can get software which will let me recover the content of the drive in a format which my MacBook Pro can use/understand? Or is it a lost cause?
I had done some research on the topic here and found one thread which mentioned accessing the drive via the "Terminal" (sounds wonderful, if I knew what it was and how to use it) and correcting a read and write setting, copying its content over to the hard drive (well- that is not possible as I have a smaller internal than that drive is but no never mind) and getting the non-mounting drive to once more mount.
Could that ^ be something worth pursuing? I cannot ask on the thread as it is from 2006 and, obviously, archived.
Hoping for some good news but am resigned almost.
Thank you for reading!

Did you try using a powered USB hub?
Mac's now cut off port powered drives if they draw too much current.
The external drive is a powered SATA, currently residing in a powered SATA to USB housing, no extensions. No, the drive is actually just not supported anymore and was not mountable before.
Also use the Mac version of Data Rescue for file recovery, it knows the Mac file formats better than PC file format recovery.
I cannot recover anything with a Mac because the Mac will not read it. It is not supported due to something my friend did with his PC:
This is only since he had a go at recovery. Before then it was supported and appeared fine- just not mountable.
Obviously what happened is it took the MPEG portions of the Mac files as it understood that and discarded the rest.
Yes, I gathered that and explained as much to him. It discarded the entire 120GB FCPro project file I kind of would like to recover.
Not sure what now...
You had mentioned cloning/imaging etc. which you edited out. Could that be something which can be done with a PC (I am not a PC user but I guess I could have a go) and then I use said image on the Mac to copy the bits I need to transfer to the Mac-formatted storage device? Or- with a different Mac? Not sure why that would make a difference but I am happy to try anything!
Thank you to you both christopher rigby1 and ds store- means a lot not to be completely up the creek without a paddle. I just wish that I had not been overwhelmed by the offer of assistance from a PC user and had had more of a go myself. I suspect it would not be this difficult now.

Can't boot from from mounted external drive.

I have recently purchased a Western Digital 1 TB My Book Studio external drive, for backup for my 20 inch imac Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.4 GHz mid 2007, 3 GB ram, 320 GB internal drive, running OSX Snow Leopard 10.6.8.
I have formatted the external drive, GUID partition, and installed Snow Leopard on it. The drive mounts in all modes (Firewire 800, FW400, and USB).
It shows up as a bootable drive in the System Preferences->Startup Disk pane. However, I cannot get it to boot in any mode - I get only a blank white screen on startup, and after waiting 15 minutes I turned off power and restarted pressing the option key; the white screen then showed only the internal imac drive. Then the desktop still shows the external My Book external drive on the desktop.
The Western Digital website shows this drive to be bootable on Intel Macs.
How can I get the drive to boot from this external drive?
Thanks in advance for any help.
Donaldb

Ok, please excuse my extreme ignorance on Macs.
I was holding down the command key (the one with the apple on it) instead of the option key (which perversely says alt on it!!!)
The whole thing works fine when I do it right. Stupid me.
Thank you for your help.

Time Machine can not be mounted - external drive

I have an external Maxtor USB drive that's been my time machine since forever. Yesterday I noticed that it's not mounting. I KNOW it was mounting the day before because I had to use it. But now the drive is not mounting, and I don't know why.
The drive is on, the light is on, but it's not mounting. Out of curiosity, my husband hooked it up to his Vista PC and he was able to browse to it all dandy. But then back on my computer, it's not being recognized.
It's not showing up in disk utility, though my other external drive, my iphoto drive, is having no problems. It's not the USB port, as my ipod works on either port, as does my iphoto drive.
Can anyone help?
I've unplugged it, plugged it back in. Rebooted the computer without it attached.

I solved my problem. I tried plugging it into another computer and it popped up on the screen. AHA! Before I tried that, I had ONLY unplugged the drive but had NOT crawled under the desk to unplug it from the main power source. It just needed to be TOTALLY unplugged and left alone for a few minutes. Those little green men obviously can bunch up anywhere and need a total disconnect, for several minutes at least, to unbind. Ahh, sort of like un-constipating the system?
KC
Message was edited by: KCChoirgirl

How to mount external drives

Being new to iMac and connecting four external drives I need to know how to mount and dismount them

noondaywitch
Thanks for your help and I've followed your reply and yes I can see how to mount and eject drives.
Probably it would have helped if I had told you that my drives are all USB.
All connected to a small four way hub which is then connected to one USB socket in back of computer.
One - I use as a music drive and is a 160 gb iomega
Two - is a partitioned drive for Photoshop use 340 gb WD
Three - is a drive which has all my ex-Windows computer files and is one TB WD
Four - is a Video and Film drive of one TB WD
Five - is my dedicated auto backup drive which is of one TB WD and is connected directly to a USB socket of computer.
I normally set my computer to sleep until the next time I'm using it, then when I do go to use it, I get the warning message regarding drive was not ejected. Didn't have problems like this on PC so I became worried that in time I'm going to loose files and or the complete drive. Which one is giving me this message is also a bit of trial and error problem. Like suck it and see.....lol.
Anything else you can help me with this query would be most helpful and appreciated. Like do I have to eject all drives before leaving computer and then mount all the drives again for next session.
Regards
John

Mounting external drives with UID in Openbox?

I've just changed my system from gnome to openbox as my main WM.
In Gnome, my external drives were mounted as i connected them, with the UID.
Now, in OpenBox with every filemanager (pcmanfm2, thunar + thunar volman installed, nautilus) i tried, they are just being named
"disk [insert number]" again. how do i change this behaviour? which terminal outputs do you need?
Last edited by gpunkt (2010-05-30 11:11:55)

I don't quite understand what behavior you got with Gnome. Is that the filemanager "names" the drives with their UUID?
For me, the filemanager shows the drives with their label names.

Organizer cannot find external drive

The organizer shows a disconnected external drive H/ in grey but the Drive containing images etc is external drive I\. Photoshop elements 6 has no problem with this but Premiere Elements 4 cannot see beyond the Drive H/.

If you have tried all the suggestions given so far without success here's a couple more:
Turn your computer off
Turn on all the external hard drives that you have connected at some time
Turn your computer on and see if that has fixed the drive letter assignment confusion in PrEl.
If there is still no joy then go through this procedure (this is for Vista but if memory serves me it's much the same in XP).
Exit PrEl first then right-click the 'My Computer' icon on your desktop and select 'Manage'.
If you get a Vista 'Windows needs your permission' box, click continue. This brings up the Computer Management window. Open up Storage and Select 'Disk Management'. This will bring you a graphical representation of your drives:
If you scroll down you will see other Disks 3, 4, 5, etc... What you are looking for is the one that has your pictures on it and the one that has 'stolen' the [I:] letter.
You must then change the drive letters so that the:
wrong [I:] is assigned a different letter
right [I:] icorrectly assigned to [I:]
WARNING: UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES CHANGE THE DRIVE CONTAINING WINDOWS (nearly always the [C:] drive).
To perform the letter assignment right-click the drive and select 'Change Drive Letter and Paths...'
This displays the following dialog from which you select 'Change':
Use the drop down box to select the wanted drive letter.
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Neale
Insanity is hereditary, you get it from your children

Jaguar OS no longer is able to mount external drives

I am using a PowerMac 7600 with a Sonnet G4 processor (OS 10.2.8) to download streaming audio to an external hard drive. This has served me very well for a number of years. All of a sudden, the 7600 can no longer mount an external drive, neither USB nor FW. The Drive shows up in Disk Utility but the name of the volume is grayed out. The problem exists with several different drives which mount OK to my MacBook. Using the Disk Utility to attempt to mount the drive has no effect. Neither Rebooting nor Repair of Permissions solves the problem.
Suggestions please.

USB and FireWire Quick Assist
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1151?viewlocale=en_US
What to do if your computer won't recognize a FireWire device
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=88338
Dealing with FireWire problems (drives not mounting, devices unrecognized, etc.)
http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20041221081432908
Common fixes for USB device issues (unrecognized, etc.)
http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20070824012114701
 Cheers, Tom

Is there a convenient way for SnowLeo to mount external drives?

I'm getting a bit peeved at having to use Disc Utility to mount my external drive every time i want to use it.
Yes, I can just detach and reattach it physically, but I have no reason to detach it. It is always connected to my iMac. Snow Leo requires that I eject it before putting the computer to sleep. If I don't eject it, the computer wakes up again.
When I want to mount the external drive again, I assume the only way to do so is by using Disc Utility.
Is there some trick to do this an easer way? Third party app?? This is so UNapple.

Offhand, I'd say get an external drive that doesn't wake your computer.
You can use diskutil to mount and unmount disks:diskutil unmountDisk "diskName"
diskutil mount "diskname"To implement this, create a new Automator Application. Drag in a 'Run Shell Script' action from the Utilities library. Paste in this codediskName='ACOM150'
isMounted=$(diskutil info $diskName | awk -F ":" '/Mounted/ {gsub(/[[:space:]]*/,"",$2); print $2}')
if [ $isMounted = 'No' ]
then
diskutil mount $diskName
else diskutil unmountDisk $diskName
fiReplace "ACOM150" with whatever your disk name is.

Cannot mount external drive

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