Disk drive disappears

I've got a Powermac G4 DP 800 that the disk drive works fine, but when I attach a hard drive to the ATA ribbon, neither drive shows up,not in Disk Utility, not even in System Profiler. Unhook the hard drive, again disk drive works fine. Tried a different hard drive, same thing happens. Changed locations on the ribbon, same thing happens. The hard drives came out of an iMac G5 that went down,so I was just sticking my hard drives in the G4 for some more storage. Even if both hard drives were bad, why would the disk drive disappear even in Disk Profiler? Looks like the computer would still see the disk drive.

The problem now is the HDs are SATA with no master slave jumper settings. I can have a 160gb hd, a80gb hd, or a disk drive. I've got an open spot for a card. I'll get a card and ribbon and I'll see how that works. Neither the WD 160 nor the Seagate 80 have any jumper settings for master/slave and I've got them on SATA/IDE adapters to attach to the ribbons. I'll let you know if it helps.
It would help to have the specifics of your setup since there's things beyond standards specifications here (this is generally helpful when asking any hardware question, especially if you have made modifications to the computer). I have a dual 800 G4 tower and it doesn't take SATA drives, so I am guessing that you have an SATA PCI card. Also, I'm surprised they made SATA drives as small as 80GB and 160GB. Can you provide specific model numbers for these drives?

Similar Messages

Time machine disk drive disappears

I just bought a Seagate 2 TB external hdd to use as my Time Machine Backup drive. Time Machine formatted it properly and named it Time Machine Backups. Unfortunately, it sometimes just disappears from the desktop, which I don't notice until I try to run Time Machine. It doesn't appear in Disk Utility either. I have it conntected to a USB port on the computer. Restarting the computer doesn't help, but if I unplug and then reconnect the drive, it appears again, or at least it has so far. Any idea why this drive disappears?

Check that the data cable is securely inserted at both ends.
Try a different cable.
If you're connecting the drive through a hub, connect it directly to a built-in port on the Mac.
If you're connecting it directly, try a different port.
Disconnect all other devices on the bus, or as many as possible.
Test the drive with another Mac. Test another drive with this Mac.
If the drive is bus-powered, but has an AC adapter, connect the adapter.
Boot into Recovery and launch Disk Utility. Is the drive recognized?
Reset the System Management Controller
If the drive doesn't work under any of the above conditions, and if another drive does work with the same Mac, then the drive has failed. You may be able to salvage the mechanism by removing it from the enclosure and installing it in another one, or in a drive dock.

Storeage disk drives disappeared after installat

Hi there, I'm having a bit of a problem.
After installing my Sound Blaster Audigy SE sound card, my D and E dri'ves mysteriously disappeared. My G (CD) dri've is still visible and working, but get the following error when trying to locate my storage dri'ves:
"D/E:/ refers to a location that is unavailable..."
So for some reason, the hardware can't be found. I'm rather worried that something is wrong with them, but I'd really like to know why this happened and how I can fix it.
Any help is appreciated, thank you.

Just check, if the cables coming from those missing HDs are properly connected (this is normal issue when you install something inside the PC --> you have propably just touched the IDE cable so it has been lift up from one of its connectors (in motherboard or HD).
The other possible cause is too weak PSU (Power Supply Unit).
Also, remember disable the onboard audio (BIOS) if you have had it in use before Audigy SE.
jutapaMessage Edited by jutapa on 08--2006 2:48 PM

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.

All itunes song on ext disk drive - try shuffle - songs disappear

I have all of my itunes songs on an external disk drive. When I put in my new second gen. shuffle, most of songs disappear. I eject the ipod and re-boot and all of the songs are back. I have tried another second gen. shuffle and the same thing happens. Thoughts?

I'm wondering if you're getting a windows drive letter confusion when the shuffle is plugged in. (If the drive letter for the external changes, then iTunes would not be able to track the song down because it would be looking for them on the wrong drive.)
Windows confuses iPod with network drive or hard drive and may keep iPod from mounting or songs may seem to disappear
(The issue doesn't just affect iPod connections ... see the link through to the Microsoft article for a bit more detail on the possible symptoms with other hardware, like external drives.)

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?

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

Internal Drives Disappeared- Help

G4/1.0 DP MDD with four drives filling the internal bays. The two in the upper bay, one with the OS, show up fine. The two in the lower bay, under the DVD drive, which were showing up fine after installing 10.4.7 about ten days ago have suddenly disappeared. They don't show up under disk utility or System Profiler either. Booting with Disk Warrior, one of the drives appears on the list and DW says it is shown on the desktop, but it's not. Repaired the directory, but still nothing. Finder prefs are to show all drives.
I repaired permissions many times, zapped Pram, replaced battery, disconected the drives, checked the jumpers and reseated the connections and all seems fine. About three times over the last year, using 10.3.8 - 10.4.4 - 10.4.7, these drives disappeared temporarily, but returned upon a restart. Now they seem to be gone for good, but there must be something else I can do to try and get these drives to show up/mount on the desktop. Any ideas?? My next step is to remove the drives and put them in cases to check them, but I have a feeling that the drives are OK and there's something else going on here. I think the bus that these drives are attached to are slower than the main bus, but I only use these drives for backup and fortunately most of the info is old and not important. Still, I'd like to solve this puzzle. BTW all other types of external drives, Firewire, SCSI, USB are all working fine and I disconnected everything peripheral from the CPU to troubleshoot.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
MacScott
G4/1.0 DP MDD Mac OS X (10.4.7)

I had the exact same issue and did nearly all of what
you did, which are the typical troubleshooting
procedures.
This worked for me: replace the PATA cable with a
fresh one that is NOT a cable select IDE cable. The
cable select IDE has a little sliver cut from a
segment of the ribbon that makes the driver CS no
matter what the jumper setting.
I have no idea why this worked but it did. I have
not had a problem since.
Thanks, but I'm a little confused. So a new cable for each drive or are there doubles? Is this a universal cable Mac/pc? Maybe the cable that came with the drive (that I probably threw away)? Do you know the link of a supplier? Would any Apple store have these??
Knowing why this worked would relieve a little anxiety. Do these cables go bad just sitting in the cpu?
Anyway I googled PATA and I'm still not sure if I'd know the difference between a cable select and a non CS. I'll continue my research.
Thanks again!
Hmmm, swapping the drives. Maybe I'll try this before I swap the cables.
Thanks,
G4/1.0 DP MDD Mac OS X (10.4.7)

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

Urgent Help Needed - Frozen disk drive & mouse

This is quite a complicated situation, but i will put it simply:
I woke my mac from its sleep, and went to connect to the internet(wanadoo broadband. It wouldnt do it and went from saying 'connecting....connecting...'on the finder bar in the right hand corner(next to where the time is)and said 'disconnecting...' over and over. This usually last a few seconds but 5 minutes later it was still doing it, so i went to restart the mac.
When it was restarting, it went to the login page, and it never does this, so i went to use the mouse to click on it, but it wouldnt move from the top left corner of the screen. So, i used the keyboard to select it and logged in. Once it had got into the finder the mouse still wouldnt move. The time kept coming on and then disappearing again over and over.
I have tried opening Norton Disk doctor but i can select any options because the mouse wont work and a live update comes up before it opens and i cant select the option of not to use it. I have tried several things, i restarted using the on/of button and no change, i have unplugged all the usb devices but nothing has changed.The disk drive wont open either when i click on the eject key. So i cant reboot from a disc because
1)disk drive wont open
2)I cant click on the apple in the top left corner to go to the restart option and then hold down any keys.
The only reason i am on the net is cos i have used my flat mates pc to hook up on the net so i can get some advice, the apple helpline wont help me as i no longer have apple care plan, and i dont want to go out and travel to a different city to get hold of a new mouse, if it isnt the initial problem.
I really need help because i have work to do and deadlines to meet and even though i have the work backed up on an external hardrive, i cant access it because what i am using is a pc and my work is formatted for a mac. I also didnt get round to backing up all my music from itunes, so i really hope it doesnt come to formatting my hardrive because i dont want to lose all my files.
Can anyone help me please? Im desperate

StreeX,
If you have time, search the Discussions for "Disk Doctor Kervorkian". Symantec Systemworks / Norton Disk Doctor is widely and consistintly blamed for making things worse, sometimes irrepairablly so. (So be grateful you couldn't select it.)
You wisely unplugged other USB peripherals, but did you try unplugging and re-pluging the keyboard and mouse? Also try disconnecting your Ethernet (and phone line if any). The only peripherals should be the keyboard and mouse.
Does the mouse's red LED light up when the computer is on? Try both with the mouse plugged into the keyboard and with the mouse plugged directly into the Mac.
You can force the optical tray to open by holding down the mouse button while starting up. It's also possible to carefully (and gently!) pry the drawer and then the tray open with a fingernail of X-acto type knife blade.
You can force the Mac to restart unconditionally holding down command-control-eject (see Magical Macintosh Key Sequences)
Can you get the Mac to start up in Safe Mode?
With the optical tray open you can try booting from youe OS X Install disc to run Repair Disk to check for errors. An alternative is to boot to single-user mode and run the file system check utility. Refer to Using Disk Utility and fsck.

Use as disk drive?

Is there a way to use the itouch as disk drive? My old ipod would show up as a drive in My Computer but this one doesn't.
I have it set to manually sync so I can use it on my 2 home computers and my work computer. I've been going back and forth between the two work home computers fine, but when I connected it to my work computer all of a sudden my music is gone! It's like it's still there, just can't be accessed b/c iTunes shows 9.5 gb of "other" which is the amount of music I had.
I have a program called Sharepod that I used on my old ipod to transfer music from the ipod to the computer, and can also recover "lost" files, but b/c my ipod isn't showing up as a disk drive, sharepod can't find it either.
The old ipods had an option iTunes to "use as a disk drive" but that's not an option with this one...

As for using it as a disc drive, I stopped trying, I didn't use my old one that way much anyway.
As for the music disappearing and having the same amount of "other", this happened to me too one time. I use a program (can't remember the name of it off the top of my head) that allows you to view the contents of your ipod (like viewing it as a hard drive) and the files are all still there (obviously, since there's that same amount of memory listed as "other"). I was able to copy the music to my computer then back onto the ipod. I lost my playlists and play-counts unfortunately, but at least I was able to retrieve all my music.

WD My Book backup drive disappeared from desktop running Lion

WD My Book backup drive disappeared from desktop running Lion !0.7.5. Disk Utility recognized the drive and has repaired it, but it still does not show up on desktop or Time Machine. My Book also appears to hold zero data now (I've had it running backups for a couple of years). What's the problem? How to remedy?

I tried this but it did not help. I did confirm that the external drive is working by connecting it to another IMac computer running Mavericks. Not sure if the recent update to Yosemite that supposedly fixed issues with time machine has messed this up or not. Trying to work with WD as well to see which side the issues is on. I remember a similar issue with Mavericks was updated making time machine unusable with the external drive.

Disk directory disappeared after 7.4.1 upgrade

I see folks are having various problems with the 7.4.1 update, but I haven't seen anything exactly like this.
After upgrading an AEBS to 7.4.1 the directory on the attached USB drive disappeared. The drive is visible in Airport Utility (5.4.1) which correctly shows disk capacity, available and used space, etc. Mac Finder and Windows Explorer can see the network drive, but cannot display the file directory - no folders or files are shown. But the properties of the drive can be displayed, and the directory is visible and intact when the drive is directly attached to a PC or Mac via USB.
Anyone else have this experience?

{quote}I don´t get it ! just delete and copy the files? just that?{quote}
Yup, that's what fixed it. 2nd level Apple Support called it "unstable directory." I asked for the technical explanation from Engineering but haven't heard back yet. Makes as much sense to me as it apparently does to you.
{quote}Another symptom is, after this firmware update several files with 0 bytes and gibberish names appear in my disk...{quote}
I didn't experience that problem. Don't know if a Mac could delete them, but reformatting would be my preference.
{quote}...how may I format fat32 500gb disk using windows vista{quote}
Try going to the drive manufacturer's site and look for a utility. For instance, I used Seagate's DiskWizard on my 1TB FreeAgent drive (http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=200895&NewLan g=en&Hilite=format+fat32).

Disk drive disappears

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