External USB drive goes to sleep, iPhoto complains when it try's to access it and exits

I moved my iPhoto to an external USB Harddrive and everything at first worked fine. Now I get these errors sometimes "Your iPhoto Library is missing". iPhoto will exit and when you start it again everything is fine. What I think is happening is the external USB drive has gone to sleep due to inactivity. Is there a setting in OS X that I can control this with ? I ugly hack would be to set up a cron job to do a ls of the root external USB drive every 15min. Is there a special feature that you should look for when buying an external USB drive ? It is very iratating to get these messages from iPhoto and iTunes.
Thanks

Check your System/Energy Saver preference pane and and make sure this checkbox is unchecked.
OT

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External Hard Drives going to sleep.

Is there a way to set an external drive to NEVER sleep. I have several externals (Lacies and Seagates running USB2.0) and they go to sleep if not accessed regularly.
Which is a problem with a documentary timeline as if I'm in a viewing it freezes when I get to a part later on in the TL that has gone to sleep....for a viewing to go smoothly I have to export a QT, which quite frankly is a pain.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Cheers,
Susan.

To force your drives to never sleep:
Launch the Terminal application (Applications>Utilities>Terminal) and type:
sudo pmset spindown X
type your password when it asks for it.
X=the number of minutes that you want till your drive spins down.
0 (zero) is never
And note that this is a more 'controlled' way of checking "Put the hard disk to sleep when possible" than in system preferences/energy saver/sleep In there, checked means 10 minutes and unchecked means 180 minutes (not never).
More info on using pmset here:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/pmset.1. html
And this text was found here
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/sbbod.html
x

I had backed up my I-tunes files to an external hard drive but after my computer crashed when I try to reload from the hard drive the message comes up saying I-tunes library cannot be read because it was created by a newer version. Help please!

I had backed up my I-tunes files to an external hard drive but after my computer crashed and I restored it when I try to reload from the hard drive the message comes up ""I-tunes files cannot be read because it was created by a newer version of I-tunes". Help Please

Upgrade the version of itunes on the new computer
Itunes.com for free download.
Peace

Lion won't sleep when my external USB drive is connected

Hi guys,
I've searched the forums and can't find anyone with quite the same problem I'm experiencing here. I've noticed that my power saving settings are not being actioned properly on my 2011 mac mini, in that the system never goes to sleep at the specified interval.
This isn't a problem that the system will not sleep at all, if I manually put the computer to sleep it obeys and goes to sleep instantly, also when using Plex media centre software, and allowing it to control the system sleep state, it also works fine.
After some digging, I found using pmset -g assertions that the system won't sleep normally because of the following
Listed by owning process:
pid 20: [0x0000012c00000014] ExternalMedia named: "com.apple.powermanagement.externalmediamounted"
At first I wondered if it was because of some network shares I had mounted, which is not the case, it does however seem to be because of my external USB hard drive. As soon as I unplugged this, the assertion went away and pmset reports sensibly and the system can sleep.
The problem is that I use the external drive to store quite a lot of media (the built-in HD is not nearly big enough to store both the OS *and* all my files), so what gives? Why will Lion refuse to go to sleep when I have an external USB HD attached, and yet sleep perfectly willingly when I explicitly tell it to do so?
Any help will be gratefully received - suggestions of buying a new external HD to see if it helps shall not be entertained and dismissed forthwith, as this setup worked perfectly well with Snow Leopard and an old style mac mini.

I am stumped too. The issue is that the 'pmset -g' command does not allow changing the ExternalMedia flag.
An observation that may be relevant to this topic is as follows: if you unmount the drive (but not physically disconnect it), sleep comes in the specified time. Upon wakeup, however, the drive is mounted again to the desktop. I've noticed this behavior with SD cards, and I assume that HDs should do the same.
If this is the case, then it may be possible to use ControlPlane (current version is ControlPlane-1.1.4) and create an "about to sleep" situation, which triggers USB disk unmounting. Haven't tried it, but was thinking to (subsequently just gave up and eject my USB storage manually).
Hope this helps.
Xen

When I try to format an external usb drive the progress bar only goes half way then freezes up can anybody help please

When I try to format an external usb drive the progress bar gets to half way then freezes , or stops and what ever time I allow it never gets any futher on , I have to go to the task bar and click quit to get on and the usb drive is not formatted is there a fault with my disk utility program I have updated the system
to lion 10.7.2
Can anybody advise please

Are these new external drives? How are the currently formatted? Have you tried doing this:
Drive Preparation
1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder.
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID then click on the OK button. Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.
4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.
5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Security button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.
6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.
Steps 4-6 are optional but should be used on a drive that has never been formatted before, if the format type is not Mac OS Extended, if the partition scheme has been changed, or if a different operating system (not OS X) has been installed on the drive.

TimeMachine wearing out external USB drives??

I have noticed an issue with external USB drives connected to my iMac. I have been using one as a TimeMachine target and have had to replace three of them over the past two years as they eventually fail and no longer mount. I am not sure if it is an issue with TimeMachine or not, but I have noticed that the USB drive seems to spin up every 15 minutes even if there isn't a backup scheduled, which could be wearing it out prematurely. Once the iMac goes to sleep the drive does not spin up. My third drive started whining a few days back and Disk Utility will no longer repair the drive. Anyone with a similar issue?

Hiya mem16421,
this is definitely related to timemachine. the following could solve your issue:
{quote: wrote:}{quote}I spoke to apple about it today and they suggested the > following course of action:
1. disable time machine
2. delete the spotlight index on the external drive
3. allow spotlight to rebuild the index
4. re-activate time machine
The above is from another forum and pertains to 10.5.x. And it shows a console entry that might look familiar to yours. Maybe the failure is due to TM trying to write permanently to an incorrectly formatted drive or a drive that wants to "go to sleep"? (hence my previous comment).

Time Capsule external USB drive won't reconnect remotely over Back To My Mac

I'm running a Mac Mini at work, connected via ethernet to an enterprise network (I have no idea what routers they are using, or how they are set up).
At home, I have a MBP laptop and a Time Capsule (hardwired to cable modem) with an external USB drive attached.
All 3 machines (Mac Mini, MBP, TC via Airport Utility) have Back To My Mac switched on.
I can access the external USB drive on my home TC from my work Mac Mini....until the Mini falls asleep. When I wake it back up, the connection back to the TC fails. However....after restarting the Mini, the connection works again.
My first thought was that the corporate network / firewall / etc was causing the problem - not leaving correct ports open, or someting to that effect. However, I realised that if that were the case, restarting the Mini shouldn't help, but it does.
Does anyone have any idea how sleeping breaks being able to access a TC's external drive remotely over BTMM?
The Mac Mini is a 2.3GHz Core i5 with 8GB RAM and plenty of HD space.
The MBP is a 15" late 2013 retina, 2.6 GHz Core i7, 16 GB RAM, also plenty of HD space.
The TC is a 2 TB 4th generation model.
Thanks!
J

Sorry that did not work. This works well for me using Lacie drives, but I haven't tried Iomega.
Have you checked Iomega's site to see if any software/firmware updates available?
Also noticed during a quick search that a number of users are reporting mounting problems with Iomega. Not sure if this applies to you or not.
http://discussions.apple.com/search.jspa?search=Go&q=iomegadrive+won%27tmount

No application runs after booting from an external (USB) drive

Hi all,
my best hope is that I just embarrass myself with a blatantly obvious question instead of finding a real issue that will be resolved only in later updates. Here it is:
As I want to upgrade my hard drive in my good ol' MacBook, I wanted to backup my present boot HDD to an external USB drive (freshly formatted, HFS+ journaled, GUID partition table). I tried both SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner. In both cases, the backup/cloning process goes fine, and I can reboot into the external drive, and the OS starts (yes, with wifi working, even iStat menus, textExpander etc. initiating fine). But all applications (not those on the menu bar, though) crash and notify me of some thread having tried some invalid operation, or sometimes I even got some vague reference to kernel protection.
Do you have any ideas what this is? Something new and (supposedly) secure in 10.5.6? I tried a fairly standard procedure, I think. (Also, it is a fairly pressing issue as I would not really want to waste much more time on this drive swap. And I would rather use disk-cloning than the install disk and sucking back data from an apparently unreliable backup.)
Many thanks for any thoughts!
(Just to inform the interested, I ran a fairly extensive cleaning-maintenance-rebuild cycle by the latest Onyx before starting all this, this should clean up the state of the OS pretty much. But I could not run DiskWarrior. Convince me if you think that this would solve the problem.)

Thanks Devin, I think my issue is a bit different.
I am 'long' past the 10.5.6 update (as long as possible), it did not crash, and Software Update checked what it wanted several times since then (as it is set to do so daily).
Thanks for the safe boot tip, I have not tried it yet, though I am skeptical why would this help applications starting up without breaking some kernel protection -- but only if I booted up from an external drive.
I repaired all I could before the cloning of the drive, only the deep maintenance of DiskWarrior was skipped. With the disk or the OS itself, I basically did what you can, even the stuff that you are rarely supposed to do. (Onyx is a great tool to do all these and more, freely.)
I am not sure either that a FireWire drive would have helped, but who knows. (But really, the OS would boot, just the applications would feel that their are on an 'inferior' drive?) In any case, FireWire drives are not that easy to come by, and a risky investment -- e.g. I could not use them with the new MacBooks. Oh, and all my work was done on a firm table, but again, the behavior would be hard to explain as the HDD misbehaving, as the OS had no glitch, just I could not start applications without their crashing immediately.
Thanks again, I hope I run into something useful or if it is a bug then Apple magically pushes out some update before their winter break, or I will sadly watch my precious new drive sitting on a table idly.

FSCK and reboot issues with external USB drive

I'm having an issue with an external USB hard drive I'm using. I've always had issues with this drive cause my reboot to "freeze" when it's mounted. Basically the system message with be sent out, but it doesn't actually proceed with the reboot. No switch to init 6 or anything, but the shutdown process is still active. I can continue to use the computer as usual, but I can't cancel the existing shutdown or try to enter init level 6 by hand. So I just got around this by unmounting the drive before I shutdown. However, lately when I try to unmount the drive I get an error saying that the drive is in use and I should check to see what processes are using it by runing lsof or fuser.
Yesterday I tried copying dsome files from the drive but there wasn't and activity on the drive. cp didn't report any errors though, it just sat there and did nothing. I tried running fsck on the drive, but didn't get much farther. I'll see some activity on the drive for about a second, then all activity stops and fsck just sits there. When I try to kill fsck, it won't. Even with a kill -9.
I'm really confused as to what is going on. Has anyone else had this problem? Anyone have any ideas what could be causing all this or what I can do to stop this? Thanks in advance!
David
[email protected]

Press the reset button on the device. It is located between the USB and power ports. Make sure to take-out the external USB drive before you reset the device. Or you can also restore the defaults by accessing the Administration tab > Factory Defaults sub-tab in the router’s web-based setup page. Check out this link for the set up; http://www6.nohold.net/Cisco2/ukp.aspx?vw=1&docid=32cffead811249aea7e9fc6730bf59ad_KB25681_EN_v1.xml...

External USB drives slow

Hi,
I recently purchased 2 Seagate Freeagent 500gb. I was copying files from my old external to the new one and it was going to take a ridiculously long time. So I checked into it and found the drives were showing up on the "USB Bus" in System Profiler and not the "USB High Speed Bus". This brought the speed to 12MB/s instead of 480MB/s.
Big difference. I played around with it, ejected all the drives then plugged in the Seagate's first and they went to the the High Speed Bus.
The problem is as soon as I restart they go back to the slow 12MB/s bus. I then have to eject them, and load them 1 by 1.
What gives? Anybody have any ideas?

The following fix -- partitioning the external USB drive twice using the correct partition scheme -- fixed this problem for me.
I can't claim originality -- I got the idea from a Time Machine thread on apple.com (which I can't find now).
Unplugging the external USB drive and cycling power was not working for me -- so there may be more than one problem here.
Here's what worked (note that this will erase the disk!):
1 - Open Disk Utility and highlight the disk description (not the volume name).
2 - Choose the "Partition" tab (which won't appear if you have the volume highlighted).
3 - In the Volume Scheme pull-down, select "2" (or any other number 1).
4 - Click the Options button and choose the GUID Partition Table (if you've got an Intel Mac -- other choices are explained on the page that appears).
5 - Click "Apply."
6 - Now repeat steps 3 - 5, except create a single partition (Volume Scheme = 1).
That should do it!
While you've got Disk Utility open, you may want to check your drive format as well.
(cross-posted in http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6050391#6050391 )

ESATA - No Hotswap - Connected drives going to sleep - BSOD

Hello Forum,
I have a brand new HP Envy 700-215xt, running Windows 7 Home Premium.
I purchased an eSATA bracket so I could hotswap two external drives. DRIVE 1 is a 1TB SAMSUNG drive in an enclosure by Acomdata. DRIVE 2 is a Hitachi 250 GB laptop drive in a simple no-name enclosure.
*** PROBLEM #1 ***
Both drives show up fine in Windows if they are attached and powered on before booting up. Neither of the drives appear at all when powered up after the computer is already booted. Going into device manager and selecting "Scan hardware for changes does nothing. The only way to make the drive available to the OS is to reboot the computer. This is very disappointing. I thought eSATA was supposed to be hotswappable.
Since both drives worked exactly as expected on my Win XP machine, I suspect this has to do with the motherboard or BIOS settings. Please help me get this feature working.
*** PROBLEM #2 ***
Even when the drives are recognized by the OS, after a few minutes of inactivity, the SAMSUNG drive "goes to sleep". I can actually hear it spin down. When I try and and access the files through the explorer or any other application, I hear the drive spin up and I have to wait on order of 15-20 seconds for the drive to wake back up.
I have even gotten a few BSODs, especially when I try to shut down the computer while the Samsung drive is asleep. I have to do something to wake up the drive before I can shut down.
Where are the settings for me to disable this annoying behavior?
Thanks for your help,
-Steve
This question was solved.
View Solution.

eSATA on HP PC's depends on what its plugged into.
If you have an external PCIe card, this will hotswap if the card allows it. There is nothing within the motherboard to stop that, its an external controller and will function as such.
If your external esata card is simply a port with a cable going to one of your sata ports then you will need to have it going to either a port on the motherboard labelled as esata, or a sata port that allows you to select internal or external in the bios.
Not all HP's are very forgiving in this regard. I have an Elite 8200 CMT at work and that has one esata port. We have an external caddy in it with two bays, but we can only use one due to the limitations of this board. And the sata ports on this board can't be selected as external.

Moving Time Machine backups from Time Capsule to External USB Drive

Hi all,
hoping someone out there can help I'm trying to move my time machine backups from my old Time Capsule to my external USB drive. I've already used the Airport Utility to "archive" my Time Capsule to a USB connected WD MyBook Elite.
Right now my WD MyBook Elite has both the archive, and recent (roughly 5 backups) of both my MacBook & MacMini. I've tried to follow the seemingly simple steps located in the FAQ's here [URL="http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/18.html#id22"]Copy NETWORK backups to be used LOCALLY[/URL] , but I cannot past step 1.
[Quote]Right-click the new volume on your desktop or Finder sidebar and select Get Info. If the Ignore ownership on this volume box is checked, click the padlock at the lower right and enter your Admin password at the prompt. Then remove the check mark from the box and close the window.[/Quote]
There is no option to "Ignore Ownership" in Snow Leopard for the Spars Bundle or when expanding it to see its folders.
Any advice?
I'm basically trying to combine my backups to unit them into one seemless backup each for:
Mac Mini & MacBook.
Thank you in advance.

Dark Heart wrote:
[Quote]Right-click the new volume on your desktop or Finder sidebar and select Get Info. If the Ignore ownership on this volume box is checked, click the padlock at the lower right and enter your Admin password at the prompt. Then remove the check mark from the box and close the window.[/Quote]
There is no option to "Ignore Ownership" in Snow Leopard for the Spars Bundle or when expanding it to see its folders.
That's not referring to the sparse bundle you're copying FROM, but the new volume you just formatted on the USB drive you're copying TO.
If you didn't just format the partition, that box may not be shown -- it not, there's no problem and you don't need to do anything in that step.
I'm basically trying to combine my backups to unit them into one seemless backup each for:
Mac Mini & MacBook.
I'm not sure what you mean by that: you cannot combine the backups of two different Macs. You can put them both on the same hard drive, either in two different partitions, or, if any are going to be backed-up over a network, in a sparse bundle.
If I've misunderstood, please clarify exactly what you're trying to do.

Trying to move backup from Time Capsule to external USB drive

As per the title, I'm getting rid of my Time Capsule and am trying to move the backups to an external USB drive instead.
Initially I used AirPort Utility 5.6.1 to archive to the USB drive. However, when I switched TM back on, it wanted to do a full backup rather than incremental.
I then found Pondini's very useful page at http://pondini.org/TM/18.html and decided to try it this method instead. It also made me realise that I'd incorrectly formatted the new drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) when in fact the TM backup was case sensitive. So I thought this could have been the issue, but still persued Pondini's method. I formatted the drive again, this time in the correct format, and followed Pondini's guide, copying the Backups.backupdb folder from the sparse bundle to the new drive, which completed fine. But unfortunately, TM again wanted to backup everything from scratch when I turned it back on.
Any ideas what I might be doing wrong?

So it looks like I was wrong on both counts.
I misunderstood AirPort Utility's archive feature. I failed to realise that archiving actually puts the sparse bundle in a separate folder called "Data Archive" on the new drive, so of course TM won't continue using that existing backup.
It would also seem that I was incorrect in thinking that Pondini's method didn't work. When I tried it again, I realised that TM was in fact continuing the backup. Initially it looks like it's going to do a big backup, but actually only backed up a few hundred megabytes, then everything was back to normal.
Incidentally, I've also found that if you do use AirPort Utility to archive the backup, you can effectively using Pondini's "How can I copy my TM backups to a different location?" by mounting the spare bundle in the "Data Archive" folder, then dragging Backups.backupdb to the root of the drive.
I just wanted to post this for completeness and in case it helps anyone in the future.

Import/Sync Photo's from external USB drive

I would like to sync photos that are stored in a external USB drive. In iTunes the files are greyed out and I am unable to select them unless I first import them into iPhoto. That is a waste of space. Is there a workaround for this?

Check your permissions for the drive, folders and files you are trying to use. Are the photos in the correct format on the drive.

[SOLVED] Problem with external USB drive started yesterday

My system freezes for about 65 seconds at the login screen. After 65 seconds, I can login and everything is normal afterwards.
I discovered that I can eliminate the freeze by disconnecting the external USB drive from the PC. Here are the error messages from kernel.log when the drive is connected:
Oct 15 23:10:14 localhost kernel: [ 17.035091] usb 1-1.3: device descriptor read/64, error -110
Oct 15 23:10:29 localhost kernel: [ 32.155955] usb 1-1.3: device descriptor read/64, error -110
Oct 15 23:10:29 localhost kernel: [ 32.325394] usb 1-1.3: new high speed USB device number 4 using ehci_hcd
Oct 15 23:10:31 localhost kernel: [ 34.045126] MediaState is connected
There is supposed to be a kernel boot option (irqpoll) to prevent this from occurring. However, that option seems to no longer work for kernels after 2.6.39. If I try using it with Arch, the system will not boot, saying all the CPU's failed.
I also don't understand why this just started happening yesterday, as the USB drive has been connected to the PC longer than I've been using Arch. Also, my kernel has not been updated since I installed Arch on Oct 8.
Does anyone know another fix or workaround for this problem?
Thanks,
Tim
Last edited by ratcheer (2011-10-17 01:30:08)

Problem solved
I feel stupid, but I also feel better. I turned off the PC, disconnected the power from the USB drive for about 15 seconds, reconnected the power, rebooted, removed the irqpoll kernel option, and Ubuntu started, perfectly. I need to learn that the USB drive just goes freaky sometimes and remember to do this. But, this is only the second time I've had to do this in months of use.
Tim

External USB drive goes to sleep, iPhoto complains when it try's to access it and exits

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