Did my hard drive disappear?

so my powerbook decided to freeze, i restarted it and it showed a grey screen with a little folder with the mac icon/face thing and a question mark blinking over it, it also shows a blinking globe before that. i tried starting it up with my osx disk and tiger. i opened the disk utility on the osx one and nothing was listed on the left hand side except for the powerbook software disk. i tried reinstalling but i had nothing to select to install it to. is there a way i can fix this or is this it for my powerbook? i no longer have a protection plan on it, so im mortified haha

Welcome to the discussions, alcsos.
If it was just corrupt System software, the drive should show up in Disk Utility when you booted from the OS X CD. Sounds to me like the hard disk is either dead or disconnected. And I think it's unlikely that it would spontaneously disconnect. If you can, I'd get it checked out by an Apple certified technician before you do anything drastic (on the off chance that it's just a loose or dodgy cable).
However, it's possible that you'll have to replace the HD. If you do, you'll need a 2.5" ATA 100 drive. You'll probably be able to get one in a higher capacity than you had (possibly faster too), so that's a bright side to consider.
Here's a how-to guide on replacing the HD:
http://www.pbfixit.com/Guide/53.11.0.html
About 30 different screws to contend with, so careful planning and meticulous execution are essential. This will void your warranty (if you had one), and a wrong move could kill the PowerBook. Note the tools required to perform the task. If you don't feel comfortable messing around inside a valuable piece of electronic equipment, bring it to some place reputable and get it done professionally.

Similar Messages

Internal Hard Drives Disappeared, Finder Memory Problem

Hello Helpful Folks,
I recently installed an addional internal Hard Drive, and an additional 1GB SDRAM. This worked great for a day, but the next morning, after powering up, system was extremely sluggish, and after much deadline-induced impatient problem solving, has gone from bad to worse (system refuses to acknowledge existence of internal Hard Drives). I apologize in advance for the length of this post, but as
the devil is in the details, I figure too much info is better than not enough.
Following is a breakdown of my system: AS IT LAST WORKED; RECENT UPGRADES; and MY LAME ATTEMPTS AT PROBLEM SOLVING THAT HAVE MADE THINGS WORSE. Please don't interpret my all caps as shouting, just trying to organize this post for better clarity.
System is dedicated to Video Editing with FCP 3, running under OS 9.2.2. System is "off the Grid", i.e. no network, no internet, no printer, no gaming devices. System was purchased new in July 2001, by a friend. At one point I know this system had an Airport card, which was removed prior to my purchase in 2003. I can't remember what else it may have had installed in its history, but here's what it has now:
SYSTEM AS IT LAST WORKED:
**bold items are upgrades Original Owner or I installed with no apparent problems**
Power Mac G4 "Quicksilver" 2001
867 PowerPC G4, 256 L2, 2MB L3
-1 Stick "ValueRAM - KVR 133 x 64 C3/512" in PC 133 DIMM slot **
- "Virtual Memory" was turned off years ago due to conflict with FCP 3
-2 empty DIMM slots
-1 60 GB internal HD (Maxtor Ultra ATA/100), 1 partition, formatted HFS+, jumpered as "Master" on Internal ATA 2 ID=0 (which as I understand it is ATA/66 speed)
-1 Pioneer "Superdrive" DVD-R/W/CD-R/W on Internal ATA 0 ID=0
-NVIDIA GeForce2 MX with 32MB SDRAM in AGP Slot, feeding a 17" Apple Studio Display.
-PCI Display Card "formacGA7" - not attached to any external device, not sure what its intended purpose is.**
-3 Empty PCI Slots
-OEM Keyboard attached to Monitor's rear USB port.
-Microsoft 3 Button Wheel mouse with "IntelliEye" (wheel is 3rd Button) connected to Keyboard USB port (right side).**
-2 OEM FireWire (400) ports
-2 OEM USB (1) ports
Peripherals that have worked in various configurations with this system over the past 3 years:
-3 OWC Mercury Elite ("Oxford Chipset") Externally powered, External FireWire(400) 200GB Hard Drives, 1 partition each, formatted HFS+, daisy-chained to either of the FireWire ports.
-1 Canon GL1 MiniDV camera, attached either to the other FireWire port, or to the last drive in the chain, depending on my urgency/laziness factor. BTW, FCP 3 has worked flawlessly controlling this Cam for logging and Batch Capturing.
Applications on System Hard Drive that I have OEM CDs for:
-OS 9.2 - (I think I remember that OS X was removed from system due to conflicts shortly after original purchase)
-FCP 3
-DiskWarrior (version unknown, purchased from Alsoft in 2003)
-OWC Intech Hard Disk SpeedTools ver 3.5
Other CDs I have:
OEM CDs for Power Mac G4:
-Software Install, OS 9.2, CD vers 1
-Software Install, OS 10.0.4, CD vers 1
-Software Restore, OS 9.2 & 10.0.4 CDs vers 1, Discs 1-4 of 4.
-OEM Apple Hardware Test; Power Mac G4, SW vers 1.2.1
Applications on system Hard Drive that I don't have CDs for, that I rarely use, but I'd like to keep:
-After Effects 5.0
-QuickTime Player 6.0.2
-Toast Audio Extractor 1.1
-Toast Titanium 5.0.2
Applications on system Hard Drive I use if my wife is busy on our Windows XP machine:
-Photshop 6.0
-Microsoft Word & Excel
# of other Applications on System Hard Drive I either don't use or may be integral to the system: 260
# of Control Panels:
-Enabled: 34
-Disabled: 0
# of Extensions:
-Enabled: 174
-Disabled: 0
note: a number of the applications and extensions are for AOL, Quickbooks, Microsoft Money and the like, as well as other things I don't use (Airport, USB printers, Networking, etc.)
Smart things I did:
-Regularly made backup copies of my FCP projects to the external drives.
-Bought a copy of MacDrive so I can see what's on my External Drives on the XP machine.
-Printed out System Profile before I installed upgrades.
-Thoroughly searched this discussion board for and gathered as much info as I could before upgrading.
Dumb things I did:
-Made a copy, but not a clone, of my System Folder to one of the external drives when I first got it.
-Didn't keep any sort of separate log of what's on the External Drives.
-Never ran any sort of Disk Maintenance, even after one of the Externals crashed (DiskWarrior saved my butt on that).
-Ignored some of the advice on this discussion board.
Really dumb thing I did without even realizing it:
Captured all media for a rush job onto my internal system Hard Drive, as well as storing and using massive jpgs for the same job on that same drive...
Which led to painfully slow rendering times, and crashes caused by "Error: Out of Memory", which I interpreted as "Must buy more memory" and not "must make sure I'm not trying to edit media stored on system drive, especially with massive jpgs that I should reduce"
RECENT UPGRADES:
Here's what I did, and how I did it:
Turned off system, disconnected all External FireWire Devices, disconnected Monitor, opened case, touched various metal parts of case and power supply to discharge any Static, unplugged power cable.
-Installed 2 512MB sticks of "Lifetime" PC 133 SDRAM; total System RAM is now 1.5GB, all 3 DIMM slots now occupied.
-Installed 1 Maxtor "DiamondMax" Ultra ATA/133 100GB Hard Drive (8 MB buffer) as "Slave" (no jumper) in top of U-Carrier above System Hard Drive; attached to middle of original Apple ribbon cable, attached available power plug.
Taped spare jumper to inside of empty drive bay, noting origin and date. Did NOT push PMU button. Carefully closed case. Reconnected Monitor, did NOT reconnect any FireWire devices. Powered System on, but did NOT perform PRAM reset.
I don't remember the exact order of what happened next, but I think: System booted up normally, a window popped up saying a new drive had been found, would I like to intitialize it?, which I did as Mac OS extended, and then named. If I was instructed to restart, I did so, otherwise did not. Clicked on "about this Mac" and saw that it now showed 1.5GB RAM. I then went about moving Media/Render files off the System drive (and one of the Externals) onto the Internal Drive, with a combination of FCP's Media Manager, and dragging from the Finder. After files had copied, dragged Media/Render files from System Drive to Trash. Opened FCP project, had FCP re-link to new locations of missing files. Saved, closed, and re-opened project, set Capture/Scratch disc to new internal Drive. At some point I changed FCP's Memory Allocation from whatever it was to 512000KB Minimum, and 900000KB Prefered (and I hope I got all those zeroes right). Did NOT restart after changing Memory Allocation, unless a window popped up instructing me to do so, in which case I did. Re-opened my project, rendered a few thing at a noticeably increased speed, saved everything, emptied the Trash, shut everything down, and called it a night as it was 4:30 am.
A few hours later, I plugged the MiniDV and an External Drive into the FW ports and powered up the System. It was behaving extremely sluggishly. I would click on something, the pointer would turn into a wristwatch (sometimes with the minute-hand moving, sometimes not) and like an actual minute later, what I'd clicked on would open. All three drives were on the desktop, still had their files, and "About this Mac" still showed 1.5GB total Memory. So I powered down, disconnected the FW devices, waited a bit, and powered back up. Same sluggish response. I tried to open my FCP project file, and instead got a Window that said something to the effect of "The Application associated with this document could not be found". I think I tried to open FCP from the Applications folder on the System Drive and got the same message (I'd only had 3 hours sleep, no coffee, my client had died, and his family was coming for whatever I had in a few hours).
LAME ATTEMPTS AT PROBLEM SOLVING THAT HAVE MADE THINGS WORSE
Panic had set in, which never solves anything, so I don't remember what order I performed which tasks, between searching for clues in this forum, and convincing myself that that would be faster than trying to compose a question, waiting for a response, etc.
The first two things I did, and I can't remember which I did first (both from Keyboard Commands during Restart):
Rebuild Desktop
PRAM Reset
Neither of those solved the problem, so I continued.
I tried restarting without extensions.
I would get errors that said something like "Not Enough Memory to Open Finder".
I tried booting from Disc 1 of the Software Restore Disk, which only wanted to destroy my data.
I tried booting from the OS 10 disk, with the same result.
I was finally able to boot from the OS 9.2 Software Install Disk, and actually saw both internal drives on the desktop, and the 1.5GB RAM in About this Mac. I tried to allocate more memory to Finder, but was informed that "Cannot Perform Requested Operation. This operation requires versions above 8.0".
I think at this point I decided that I must have too many extensions, and started disabling ones I thought irrelevent to my cause (mostly anything that said "AOL", "Airport", "Ethernet", "Printer", "Modem", "Speakable", and a couple things called "Open TPT".
It gets worse. Then I decided to turn off some "unnecessary" things via the control panels, but somehow managed to disable the control panels themselves: AppleTalk, DialAssist, File Sharing, Modem, Mouse (as I saw that Microsoft Mouse was among the others), Remote Access, Speech, USB Printer Sharing, and possibly TCP/IP.
That certainly didn't help anything (though upon restarting from the OS 9.2 Disc I was able to see the extensions and control panels in their respective "Disabled" folders in the System Folder). But I still wasn't able to get more Memory to Finder.
So, I decided a few more PRAM resets might help, which succeeded in making both Internal Hard Drives disappear. I tried booting up from the DiskWarrior disc, but even the Mighty DiskWarrior couldn't find the drives. I performed the longer, in depth version of the Apple Hardware Tools tests, which reported that everything's fine (including the new RAM), but made no mention of the Hard Drives at all. The deadline having long passed, I shut the system down. I read through more posts and tech articles, etc.
I searched my External drives with MacDrive on my XP, and found the drive that has the copy of my System Folder (which shows all extensions and control panels as enabled); not sure if the Quicksilver will boot from that, I don't know what the Keyboard command for booting from a FireWire drive is (if there is one) and the drive itself only has 900MB of free space.
I can't find any reference to Internal ATA drives anywhere in the MacDrive documentation; if it was possible I'd put them into the XP, get the files off the Mac drives, reformat them and install OS9 from the Discs.
This is where I am now:
The Quick Silver is still powered down. I removed the Microsft mouse and replaced it with the OEM Apple mouse. I opened the case, and removed the PRAM/Backup battery (manufacture date: July 2001). Couldn't find my voltmeter, so took the bat to Radio Shack and bought a new one. Had the Radio Shack guy test the old one: it showed 3.69 volts still. Have not installed the new battery yet. The case is still open, waiting for any advice any of you might have to offer.
Thank you all so much for your patience in perusing and pursuing this.
Sincerely,
Patterson
Power Mac G4 Quicksilver 867 Mac OS 9.2.x 17" Studio Display, 512MB RAM

Thank you Rodney and John,
The jumpers are correct for both Maxtor Drives.
Rodney, you are correct in that the initial problem (slow rendering/"out of Memory" crashes) was caused by my not realizing I'd stupidly captured several GBs of media to my system drive, and not checking which drives those files were on (as I'd assumed I'd put them on one of my external media drives) once that problem presented itself.
Before I'd determined what I'd done, I bought the extra RAM. After I'd found the media files on the System Drive, and saw that my dedicated media drives were too full to easily move them, I decided to buy an additional Internal drive so that I could:
-Move the Media onto it relatively quickly and finish my urgent project.
-Juggle all my media into a more organized fashion for archiving (as most of my projects are on-going long-term affairs)
-Wipe it, Partition it, and clone my System Drive onto it, as a spare bootable drive in case my OEM System Drive failed.
Copying the Media files onto the New Drive and moving the System Drive's Media files into the Trash worked great: huge improvement in Rendering, etc.
Before shutting down for the night I Emptied the Trash, and was pleased with the amount of space I'd freed up on the System Drive.
My guess is that the System Drive was terribly fragmented, having been subjected to intense use over the past 5 years without any sort of Drive Maintainence, and deleting that massive amount from it in one shot caused my extreme system sluggishness upon Startup the next day.
My subsequent lame attempts to solve the sluggishnes ultimately resulted in my losing access to both drives.
Today, I replaced the Backup Battery, pushed the PMU, re-attached the AC, and Powered Up with the case open as per your suggestion.
It was trying for a few minutes (the gray screen went black at one point, and then returned to gray) before presenting me with the flashing question mark.
There was, however, a quiet but distinct "buzzing" sound that would alternate: 1 sec "buzz", one second silence, one second "buzz", one second silence, etc. coming from the drives, even after the "?" appeared.
I powered down, removed the Ribbon and Power Cables from the new "Slave" drive, and powered up again, with the exact same results.
I powered down, removed the Ribbon and Power cables from the original "Master" drive, reinstalled the Jumper on the New Drive as "Master", plugged the End of the Ribbon and the Power cables into the New "Master" drive and powered up. The screen went to the "?" within 20 seconds instead of 4+ minutes, and no more "buzzing".
I put the Apple Hardware Tools Disk in, ran the "long" test, and everything came out fine.
I have to abandon this for now, but thanks again for your previous advice, and any more you may have!
Cheers,
Patterson

Can not shut down late 2011 MacBook Pro and turn it back on again without the hard drive disappearing?

Ok, I have searched for months for an answer to this question to no avail, probably because no one has experienced it before. I am hoping however that you guys can help me figure this one out cause it is driving me nuts! Also, I am not entirely sure what section of the support I should put this under so if I stick it in the wrong place, I apologize.
Right now my problem is very simple. When I turn off my laptop, and then try to turn it back on, my internal hard drive disappears... and I get the blinking folder with a question mark on it. I have figured out something interesting however. I have an install disk with Ubuntu Linux on it. If I boot into that first, then RESTART the laptop, not shut down and turn back on, it reads the internal hard drive just fine and I can boot as if there is nothing wrong.
Second part to the problem... If I allow the laptop in either OSX or Windows to go to sleep (aka shut off the hard drive but the computer remains on), when I attempt to wake it up, I am greeted with the usual log in screen of whichever OS I am in, but is frozen and after a few seconds goes black and restarts the computer to find that... Surprise! The hard drive is gone
I have tried every trick in the book that I can think of, but can not seem to come up with a solution to the problem... I know when the problem happened and if anyone thinks that that will help them figure this out I will type everything I did up till, including the crash that caused this, and my attempted fixes, but I have class right now so only if you guys want it I will type all that out.
What I am currently running is:
2011 MacBook Pro 13in screen
4Gb of Ram
1TB internal Hard Drive
OSX 10.11.whatever the newest update is... just updated the other day again.
Windows 8.1 on BootCamp 5 (yea I know its not supposed to work but it does) again, fully updated
Ubuntu 13.10 (I think? Doesn't really matter, its just an install disk I use to boot the computer)
If there is anything else that you guys need me to provide, I can, just simply ask. I can provide as much info as is necessary.

Sorry it took me so long to write back, But unfortunately this didn't help my issue.
My uncle and I did a lot of tests on this computer and have narrowed down the location of the problem a little bit.
We tried to first reset the SMC and the NVRAM as suggested, but the only thing that did was make the fans run on full tilt for the first session after restarting it for some reason. After that we tried re installing OSX over the OSX that was already on the system (not removing any of the files). This also didn't do anything but make refit stop working. Then we moved onto the next task at hand by removing the hard drive entirely and booting it as an external drive from one of the USB ports... as long as you booted it with the options key held down, it worked perfectly fine. Then we put an alternative hard drive into the computer and installed OSX on that. This time there was no trouble booting anything up. Everything seemed to work flawlessly. So we made a backup of my original drive (OSX, Windows, and all) onto an external hard drive and tested booting to it via USB. That again worked perfectly fine and booted right up with no problems. So after that we formatted the original hard drive and reinstated OSX. We then proceeded to transfer all the old files from the backup onto this new installation and LOW AND BEHOLD..... we were back to square one with it refusing to recognize the hard drive again.
So this basically told us that there appears to be something either wrong with the hard drive, or something got really screwed up in the software along the lines and by me copying all my old files back over, I just ended up bringing the screwed up file back over with it! (despite not copying over any settings of any kind) So I am still extremely confused as to what is going wrong... did some boot sector possibly get screwed up may be?

My second internal hard drive disappeared

My second internal hard drive disappeared a couple of days ago taking many gigs of iTunes with it. It does not appear on the desktop, finder or anywhere else. When I click on a song in iTunes I get "The song “Cowell: Set Of Five - 4” could not be used because the original file could not be found. Would you like to locate it?" When I try "locate," well it shows me the Main Disk. Not helpful. I've read lots of posts about vanishing drives and crashing drives on Leopard (I run Snow and was about to go to Lion). Did my drive die or did it go into the witness protection program? Irony is that I bought a 2 TB external drive last week to back up the iTunes drive and procrastinated. Suggestions? Experiences?
JCEspinosa

Is it listed in Disk Utility?

Internal & external hard drives disappeared in Finder

It happened yesterday on my G5 running 10.4.6. I have 2 hard drives inside my G5 and one external hard drive connected with firewire 800. The second hard drive and the external hard drive disappeared in Finder. But the one that has the system on it is fine. They did show up in Disk Utility. But it said they are both "not mounted".
When I tried to repair them in disk utility, it said:
"Checking HFS Plus volume.
Invalid B-tree node size
Volume check failed.
Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit
1 HFS volume checked
1 volume could not be repaired because of an error"
Does anyone know how to fix it? I have lots of stuff in those hard drives.
Thanks
Ti Powerbook G4 1Ghz, PowerMac G5 Dual-Core 2.3 Mac OS X (10.4.6)

Sounds like you have a major problem that Disk Utility cannot fix. This has happened before to other users. I suggest you get a copy of DiskWarrior and that will probably fix it. You can read about/buy it here:
Alsoft DiskWarrior
Mulder

Shared hard drive disappearing after airport update

My shared hard drive attached to my airport extreme will mount but afterwards gives me the error message "The alias “xxxxxx” can’t be opened because the original item can’t be found." Also the drive is listed under my shared section in the finder window but when selected gives a share-point icon and doesn't allow access. This has been occurring after the airport utility update. Any information would be greatly appreciated....and I just got the access via the internet working and now this - bummer.
workaround: I have found that selecting the drive in the finder window then deselecting and selecting a second time will give me access to the drive but thats a pain in the rear.

"It will not let me verify the drive" means that I am unable to verify the drive.
Today, I installed the security update on my 24" intel imac, that I've owned since April. I restarted the machine. Up came the folder icon with the question mark. I restarted a second time and the same thing occurred. I then inserted the installer disc that came with the computer and I was able to start up the computer that way. Using the Disc Utility, I attempted to verify or repair the hard drive, but all those options were ghosted ("it will not let me verify the hard drive") Also, while there, I saw that the hard drive partitions were not recognized: there were two partitions (1: 500GB; 2: 198GB) but now it was registering a single drive at 698GB of 750.
I then called Apple support. We reset the PRAM. We did a hard drive test (restart holding "d") and that test produced no error. We then tried unplugging all peripherals, including the power supply, and letting it sit for a few moments. The imac restarted to the same results. Finally, the tech suggested attempting an archive install, which was not available as an option. Further, the install disc did not detect an available hard drive for installation, so the option to reinstall the OS was not an option, either.
The tech said my only option is to take it in for service, leaving me unable to work for four to five days (if I'm lucky), as they won't get to it until Monday, and even then they're backed up.

USB keys and external hard drives disappear after 30 seconds to 1 minute of being mounted.

I just got my 15' MacBook Pro refurbished (by Apple), and everything is working well except my USB ports. My USB keys appear for 30 seconds to as much as 2 minutes before disappearing from eveywhere, my desktop, finder and disk utility. I have a 1 TB WD passport for mac that also has the same problem, but can stay on the desktop and copy files for around 10 minutes. Then error -36 shows up, the hard drive disappears from the desktop and finder, but only appears in disk utility. It is powered as well, The light is currently flashing indicating it's receiving power as I am typing this. But still, no way i can copy anyhting onto it.
I have searched and searched for the solution to this problem, I have tried using apple script to find "invisible hard drives." and that doesn't work either.
On my windows partition in bootcamp, all usb keys work perfectly fine.
Is it because the USB ports are out of energy and dying? If so, should the refurbishment have covered that and replaced them? (Note: refurbishment included everything from my Keysboard to my battery to my Optical drive and cable optical drive flex)
Is there anything I can do to fix this problem on my own?
Any help I can get would be greatly appreciated.

Hi wdmpfm,
Here is something from an earlier post on the -36 error that may help to identify the issue:
A -36 is a disc I/O error. You might have a corrupt file, or a corrupted drive. Try creating a new file and see if you still get the error. If you do, it might be wise to run a Disc Repair program to see if it can find any errors that it can fix.
And one from another thread:
You need to format your drive correctly. New drives come formatted for Windows, & then they seem to work — but not properly.
+Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility+
Choose one of the +Mac OS Extended+ formats.
Obviously first you will have to back-up all the data you have already put on the drive, because it will all be lost when you re-format.
Hope one of these may help!
Cheers,
GB

How do I get out of kernel panic? kernel panic upon boot. I did that hard drive cleanup and reinstalled Lion. What about memory? Anyone think I need to upgrade my memory? I have 8gig.

I get kernel paic upon boot. I did that hard drive cleanup and reinstalled Lion. What about memory? Anyone think I need to upgrade my memory? I have 8 G of upgraded RAM. (20 inch iMac core 2 duo)

If you're able to boot, launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ If you’re running Mac OS X 10.7 or later, open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the page that opens.
Select the most recent panic log under System Diagnostic Reports. Post the contents — the text, please, not a screenshot. For privacy’s sake, I suggest you edit out the “Anonymous UUID,” a long string of letters, numbers, and dashes in the header and body of the report, if it’s present (it may not be.) Please don't post "shutdownStall" or "hang" reports.
If you can't boot in the usual way, try a safe boot. The instructions provided by Apple are as follows:
Be sure your Mac is shut down.
Press the power button.
Immediately after you hear the startup tone, hold the Shift key. The Shift key should be held as soon as possible after the startup tone, but not before the tone.
Release the Shift key when you see the gray Apple icon and the progress indicator (looks like a spinning gear).
During startup, you’ll see a progress bar, and then the login screen, which appears even if you normally log in automatically. You must know your login password in order to log in. If you’ve forgotten the password, you will need to reset it before you begin.
Safe mode is slower than normal, and some things won’t work at all.
Note: If FileVault is enabled under Mac OS X 10.7 or later, you can’t boot in safe mode.

Hard drive disappears and Disk Utility is not finding it

I woke my computer up from sleep this morning, launched Final Cut Pro and it threw me an error. It said there was a permissions error for one of the volumes FCP was using, then my hard drive disappeared.
It does not show up in Disk Utility, nor does it appear in System Profiler.
I took the SATA drive out of my Mac Pro and tried to mount it using an external SATA to USB dock. It spins and sounds ok, but still won't mount.
Anything I can do to revive this drive?

all of this pretty clearly indicates that the drive is dead. get a new one.

Where did my hard drive space go

where did my hard drive space go. Is there a way to see where, and how, my hard drive space is being used up?

Download a utility like OmniDiskSweeper 1.8 to provide a map of how your drive space is used. Also, you should look at how much space you consume in your Home folder:
Navigate to /Users/ folder. Select your Home folder. Press COMMAND-I to open the Get Info window. This will display in the upper panel the follwing:
Drive Capacity.
Drive space Available.
Drive space Used.

External hard-drive disappeared after dragging into Spotlight

Dear users,
My external hard-drive under devices disappeared after I dragged it into Spotlight to reindex it to make it searchable.
There was a cloud puff animation when i dragged it from the devices icon on the left of folders to the spotlight privacy box window.
Please help. Thank you!

Hi there,
did you find out what the problem was or how to re-map the ext. HDD?
I have the same problem.
thank you.

Songs can't be found on computer or hard drive - disappeared overnight.

I synced my iPod yesterday. Today some songs - that synced successfully yesterday - are now no longer 'able to be found' on my computer's iTunes. I have just subscribed to iTunes Match. Any suggestions? A large number of songs have just... disappeared. Not happy.
Last week I transferred all of my music to an external hard drive. I thought that this could be the problem, but since then I have synced my iPod and there were no error messages and the currently missing songs still live on my iPod. I've searched my computer, as well as my external hard drive, with no sign of the files.
It's quite a few songs, and I am traveling and so no longer have the original CDs that they came from.
Have they simply disappeared to iTunes song heaven?
Thanks!

Did you recently erase and/or reinstall the OS?
And, some details are needed: model/year Mac, Mac OS version running now and which version originally).

Hard Drives disappearing

A few weeks ago I got 2 1.5 TB Samsung hard drives. I put them in as a RAID volume for redundancy. I was having issues with this however. It seemed that it would go to sleep or something and an app that needed to access it would hang and need to force quit. I then split the drives up into 2 drives and am using Time Machine (which ultimately is better for my needs). Well now I've noticed that these drives will disappear from the Finder. Sometimes I can see them, but they appear empty. Other times they will be there on boot up, then gone a few minutes later when I check my desktop. If I use a tool like System Profiler it can see the drives in there, but there is not any information after the Bay number.
I did upgrade to 10.6 after switching them from a RAID setup, but I can't say for sure it is a SL issue.
The solution is to reboot, but then the problem will eventually happen again. It is ONLY these two drives, both SAMSUNG HD154UI.

Surprised your concerns weren't addressed in some way in all this time...
Well, I guess the most obvious first, have you taken them out and put them in different bays? Used Disk Utility on them, preferably DiskWarrior? When you partitioned them, did you set them up as using GUID? And by now you've updated to 10.6.1?

Secondary internal hard drive disappeared from desktop after forced restart

I have three internal hard drives, one for system, the other two for data storage. While permorming a search on one of the data drives i clicked the "X" to the right of the spinning wheel on the bottom right of the search window to stop the search but the computer froze (wheel kept spinning). I then went through the dock and quit all applications, except for InDesign which wasn't responding to force quit.
The only way out was a force restart. Upon restart, one of the internal data hard drives did not show up on the desktop, nor after a couple more restarts, nor after restarting from the installation disk, verifying and repairing disks and permissions on the other hard drives with disk utility.
where did it go?
G4 Mac OS X (10.4.9) Dual 1.25 GHz, 2MB L3 cache each, 2GB DDR SDRAM

no it doesn't show up at all in those either.
Hmm. Then that sounds like the interface to the drive isn't even talking. You could try opening up the computer and making sure the cables are all connected firmly (of course, it should be off).
here's the log:
Nothing here looks too alarming.
Apr 21 09:51:00 Greg-Simpsons-Computer webdavd[220]:
network_mount: WebDAV protocol not supported; file:
mount.tproj/webdav_network.c; line: 2702
Apr 21 09:51:07 Greg-Simpsons-Computer webdavd[245]:
network_mount: WebDAV protocol not supported; file:
mount.tproj/webdav_network.c; line: 2702
Was your iDisk mounted at the time? Or another WebDAV server?
Apr 21 09:51:20 Greg-Simpsons-Computer
diskarbitrationd[39]: mdsyncServer [193]:28715 not
responding.
Apr 21 09:51:20 Greg-Simpsons-Computer
diskarbitrationd[39]: mds [171]:28163 not
responding.
Hmm. These are part of Spotlight, but they don't really give any clues, just that they weren't responding. Which might be because the drive disappered during your search.
Waiting for MirrorAgent to launch and respond to
CFMessagePortCreateRemote(). [186]
Again, part of iDisk.
2007-04-21 09:52:41.360 SyndicationAgent[252]
WARNING: BestCalendarDateFromString - can't
interpret: 'Sat
that last line then repeats a lot of times
Nothing to worry about. It's badly formatted date strings from some iTunes RSS feeds. They're default bookmarks in a couple of places, which is why you see them sometimes.
2007-04-21 11:13:12.192 Pro Tools M-Powered Demo[352]
CFLog (21): GetDiskFragment returns -2804 for
<Product Registration><Product
Registration><AWSCommonSymbols.dll> when trying to
load /Library/Application Support/Product
Registration.app/Contents/MacOS/Product Registration
This is ProTools trying to load a piece of code. If ProTools is working, then I'd say it's nothing to worry about. Error -2804 is "specified fragment not found", but if it handles it okay, then it could just be an informational message.
Adobe LM Service: Started
AdobeLM Service
Just the Adobe license manager telling you it started. Nothing to worry about.
Unfortunately, I don't see anything helpful here. It's just like it disappeared (or never existed) as far as the OS is concerned. If you can find your original disks that came with the computer, you could try running the hardware test and see if it kicks up any errors, either with a drive or a drive controller on the motherboard.
charlie

Why do hard drives disappear off network?

I have a PowerMac G5 with a number of external Firewire hard drives. One of them failed today so I had to turn it off. As soon as I did, the FW800 drive chain, including shared 1TB drive used as the home's iTunes library, are no longer visible on the network. They show up on the G5 and there is nothing wrong with them or the connections.
What would cause all three FW800 drives to drop off the network radar, so they can't be seen when I'm logged in from any other computer? It's the weirdest thing and it's got me scratching my head. I'm baffled.
To help you analyze the problem, here is the configuration:
* Internal Mac FW800 port goes to a 1TB backup drive, which is daisy chained to another 1TB backup drive, as well as the 1TB iTunes drive and a FW400 drive. This daisy chain was necessary because there is only one 800-speed port available on the computer. That entire daisy chain is no longer visible on the network, but it was when the now-defunct drive was connected and running at the end of that chain. That's what has me confused.
* Internal Mac FW400 port goes to a 160GB portable drive. This one is visible on the network.
* 1 PCI card FW400 port goes to a 500GB drive which is daisy chained to another 500GB backup drive. Neither of these are visible on the network, but they used to be.
* 1 PCI card FW400 port goes to a 320GB drive which is daisy chained to another 320GB backup drive. These both continue to be visible on the network.
* 1 PCI card FW400 port goes to a video camera for digital video input.
So two of the daisy chains dropped off the network as soon as one drive was turned off. What gives with that? I know I can look for a new PCI card with FW800 ports, but that's not the point. My issue is that this configuration worked fine on the network when there was an extra drive attached. How would removing a drive from the chain cause it to disappear from view?

The drive was not "erased". It was simply partitioned. If you want to actually "erase" the drive, you need to select the "write zeros to drive" option. This does not really "erase" the drive either but it overwrites all of the data on the drive with zeros which is as close to being erased as a drive can get. This will take much longer that the simple "erase drive" option which only deletes the drives directory.

Did my hard drive disappear?

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