EXTERNAL DRIVE IS NOT MOUNTING--help!!

Hello Everyone--
I hope you can help. I go a frantic message from a friend of mine who is a DJ and on a cruise ship spinning...
Here's his dillemma:
I just tried transferring some mp3s from a 2 terrabyte Western Digital hard drive and it was DOS formatted so that it would read a bunch of files from a third hard drive but when I was trying to copy files over to my LaCie terrabyte HD that was just replaced It froze up and then My LaCie would not mount after restarting . It does show up in utilites with the bottom part shaded out in gray. I try to repair the disc and get this message:
Verifying volume â€œLaCie Diskâ€
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Incorrect block count for file .journalHistoryLog
(It should be 9 instead of 11)
Invalid node structure
The volume LaCie Disk needs to be repaired.
Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit
Any help you can give me would be greatly appreciated. Have a nice day!
Message was edited by: Angelo J. Guglielmo, Jr.
Message was edited by: Angelo J. Guglielmo, Jr.

"Invalid node structure" is a serious directory error.
Try Disk Warrior to rebuild your directory but I don't know if it could mount the volume.
Your other option, since the disk shows but the volume does not is to choose it, erase disk and format either Mac OS Extended (Journeled) or, MS-DOS to be readable on both Mac and PC.
-mj
[email protected]

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I was really unsure where to post this. If you think it should be in a different thread then let me know.
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I have had no replies where I had previously posted so I thought I would try here as I think that it is mainly an Airport problem.
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If they are Firewire, read on.......
Thought you could use this info about getting FireWire to work!
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If that didn't work, download the combo update from this site (yours may be corrupt), not Software Update, disconnect all firewire + USB devices except keyboard + mouse, Repair Permissions, re-install update, Repair Permissions again + try.
If that still didn't get it Zap the PRAM. While restarting Mac hold down the following key combo Command-Option-P-R. Keep holding those keys down till you hear the second start-up chime, then release.
A bad internal PRAM battery can also cause FireWire to not be recognized, so make sure it's good!
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Here's another Fw Faq.
DALE

External Drives will not mount

Hi guys ... this is my first post in these forums, so sorry if it is in the wrong category.
I have a Mac Pro, purchased in Feb this year. I have an iOmega Ultramax firewire drive, that is partitioned into four disks.
I have had time machine running well, and it backs everything up onto a second iOmega drive I have.
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The only problem I have, is I cannot even mount the drives to format them!
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Thanks in advance,
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The only problem I have, is I cannot even mount the drives to format them!
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External Drive does not mount with Firewire but is ok with USB !

Since 10.4.4 my external drive is no more recognized using firewire, but it mounts perfectly with USB
Using FW request me to reinitialize the disk, but then, the apple disk utility it is unable to reformat!
then I unplug FW , sets USB and everything is ok!
I connected the drive to my old IMac G4 700 and evrything is fine, FW and USB, using the same drive, using the same cable. I did repeat the test many times it is always ok with the old mac and it never mounts with FW on my newer Ibook.
I did reset the openfirmware but that was not successfull!
Then I brought both iBook and the faulty Drive to a friend (he owns a powerbook and also an external drive)
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We are both very puzzled, our drives did work well before, (before 10.4.4 , and 10.4.5 did not improve!)
and now, with firewire,disks never mounts..
In addition I tried with the same cable to alternatively start, using the target mode, the ibook and the imac. For each test they were both recognized as external drives as they should..
So to try to sum up
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- FW Cable seems to be ok as targuet mode works properly
has anybody any idee?
It would be very munch appreciated..
thanks a lot for having read this long post..
External hard drive P/N:
the western digit disk 160G is in an enclosure referenced
Prolific PL3507 Combo Device
I tried to exchange the disk of this box with an old maxtor with the same bad result!
IbookG4 1.2 & IMac G4 700 Mac OS X (10.4.4)

Hi Andre, I can't remember except to say that it was mounting fine with tiger and I was able to copy files to it for backup purposes.
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Idiotic, granted. But this was an upgrade, not a full install and I maybe was trusting in Apple's ability not to do extraneous stuff during an install like windows does. Oh well...
I appreciate any further ideas. Many Thanks, Frank.

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Hi,
I did a Leopard upgrade and most everything went smoothly. But when I boot, Leopard pops up a window telling me that a disk I inserted is unreadable (it took me a time or two to realize it WAS referring to my USB 2.0 external hard drive).
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Many Thanks, Frank B.

Hi Andre, I can't remember except to say that it was mounting fine with tiger and I was able to copy files to it for backup purposes.
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I think this might be due to the fact that my iMac as a fusion drive and it boots so fast that the exteranl drive isn't finished starting up when OS X is looking for drives durring it's bootup.

Partition of external drive will not mount

I have an external, 3rd party, 1TB HD connected to a MBPro via USB.
I partitioned this drive into 2 parts, one of which I have been using for TM backups. It worked for a month and then the mount of the TM partition started to fail. The partition I use for user space still mounts OK.
My last TM backup was 3 days ago. The TM partition started to fail to mount then. Disk Utility is unable to mount this partition.
Suggestions that do not require reformatting?
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Thanks.

Great idea, Twittly.
I hooked the drive in question up to a 2nd mac and spent about an hour there w/Disk Utility running on the drive and/or the individual partitions.
Never saw a problem!!!!! But ... Diskutility did spend a huge amount of time in fsck_hfs (as shown by Activity Monitor) on the TM partition. that tells me that something is really wrong w/that parttion even though Disk Utility gave it a clean bill of health.
The partition still would not mount, even on the 2nd Mac, even using the Mount command from Disk Utility.
I am now resigned to takng Shootist's recommendation ... or maybe I'll just junk the drive & replace w/something else.
Thanks everyone!!

External drives will not mount on 10.2.3

whatever working drive i use (and i've tested a few), my old iMac (OS 10.2.3) will not mount anything external.
the drives work as evidence by the fact that they mount on my other Macs.
and the USB ports work (confirmed by testing the keyboard in each one).
yes, the Finder view preferences are set to show external drives.
to complicate matters, Disk Utility shows only the hardrive.
the issue is with 10.2.3 and i have no idea what's up.

It was not until Mac OS X 10.6.4, not possible to run on a 10.2 machine, that ExFat was supported.
Many older Macs also will not recognize GUID formatted partitions made to boot Intel Macs either.
10.2.3 is the first system to support Apple Partition Map HFS Extended (Jornalled).
There may be NTFS support based on my tip here:
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3003

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I have a Toshiba MK5055GSX 500GB external drive which I use for Time Machine but for some reason it does not automatically mount from a cold boot. Before I started to use it for Time Machine (it was formatted as NTFS at the time) I had not problems with it. All other external drives correctly mount on boot.
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Does this drive have a separate power brick? If it does I suggest using it to see if that fixes the problem. If the enclosure has both USB and Firewire ports try using the drive on a Firewire port instead of a USB port.
It sounds like the drive is not spinning up early enough in the startup process to be detected.
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Extended Hard Drive Preparation
1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder.
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5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.
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External drive will not mount to desktop

Ok so i just bought a new hard drive and hooked everything up to my imac. However, it will not mount to my desktop.
1. I opened disc utility and i can see that my newly purchased hard drive is listed on the LHS with 931 GB available.
2. I click on the mount button on the top and i get this message- "The disk “disk1s1” could not be mounted. Try running First Aid on the disk and then retry mounting."
3. So now i click on First Aid and attempt to repair disc, however I get this message-"Disk Utility stopped repairing “disk1s1” because the following error was encountered: Filesystem verify or repair failed."
Does anyone have any idea how to fix this problem?
Thanks in advance.

how did that solve the issue? my 350gb seagate drive just started behaving the same way as your initial post -- it shows in Disk Utility but will not mount -- even after running disk repair/verify. This just started happening two days ago...

External drive will not mount

I have a 500Gb external USB / firewire HD, and it has stopped mounting.
Disk utility can see the disk, and can see nothing wrong with it if I try to repair. However, if I try to mount the disk from disk utility, it fails to mount the disk - although it gives no error message. The disk just doesn't mount. The disk drive spins, but then it stops and everything is as it was.
I have tried various free scripts and utilities from version tracker - all give similar results.
I have tried mounting the drive from the terminal using the following command
mount_hfs /dev/disk1s3 /Volumes/Jack
but it gives the result 'mount_hfs: Invalid argument'. I made sure /Volumes/Jack existed, and I tried mount_hfs with the -or argument. All no good.
I tried booting my old G3 iBook (OSX 10.3.9), and connecting the drive to that machine. Same result in the disk utility of that machine.
Any ideas? Or do I just go back to the vendor and demand a replacement (drive is about 6 months old)? I'd rather recover the data - the drive is a backup of all my DV tapes... so I have the data, but copying on to the drive again takes about 18 hours of running my video camera and iMovie
Thanks for any advice anyone can give.
Tony

Tony:
Tech Tool Pro will run a hardware check on the drive. However, it must see the drive and be able to mount it.
Also, if you have not already done so, you can try different cables in different ports. If none of these work, and roam's suggestion does not help, especially if the drive powers up, it is likely a failed firewire bridge. If that is the case you can remove the HDD and put it in a firewire enclosure like one of these. Wherever you get it you want to be sure to get one with the more reliable Oxford 911+ chipset.
Please do post back with update, and/or further questions or comments.
Cheers.
cornelius

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all of a sudden... i was just using them... now they are not appearing on my desktop upon powering....please help?

How are they connected, USB or FireWire? Are you using a hub? Are they on the same UPS as your Mac? Have you tried the drives one at a time, if daisy-chained?

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mrfredmor_65 wrote:
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EXTERNAL DRIVE IS NOT MOUNTING--help!!

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