FCP Won't Startup Without External Hard Drive

I tried posting something about this earlier, but I don't think I titled or explained myself well.
I cannot get FCP to startup unless my external hard drive is running and mounted. This is happening on 2 different computer with different drives (1 is firewire 800, the other and eSATA minitower). With the drives off, FCP stalls on startup and I have to force quit it and sometimes 2 other identical applications titled the same: MultiMediaImporter.
After the drive is turned on the FCP opens to a new, untitled project and works normal. I can unmount the external drive and run FCP as normal as well.
I can't open any past project until that drive is up and running. I have some projects that contain no media on the external drives, and other projects that do. The only thing that is stored on these external drives is P2 media that I have imported into the FCP projects via XML.
I don't know what else to post, I'd add the problem report, but each computer seems to be stalling out at different points on boot up. However, those positions are strange, one being CoreGraphics the other on FamilyControls.
Oh, and I have tried deleting the prefs. No help at all.
I appreciate any ideas. Thanks

From the FCP menu bar: Final Cut Pro > System Settings > Scratch Disks.
What drives are set to be used as Scratch Disks? If those two externals are included in the list FCP will always look for them. As it will if the project file contains pointers to media that it expects to find on those disks, even if the media is no longer there.
You need to open each project, reconnect the media to the location where it actually is and save the project with that updated information.
Did I mention that it is not a good idea to keep FCP media on your system drive?

Similar Messages

My notebook won't recognize my external hard drive

my notebook won't recognize my external hard drive. I can safely remove it, but when i look for it on my computer its not there?

Disable Time Machine from System Preferences.
Choose Select disk button, remove the old TM backup disk and add the new one.

Why my new iMac won't read my external hard drive?

Why my new imac won't read my external hard drive??

Liz,
Sorry for not responding sooner, I support your position completely - as for the external drive I assumed that the individual was a previous mac user and knew about that (my mistake) at home I have a couple of external drives
one drive is acknowledged regardless of format (mac/win) its a partitioned drive.... the other one - far as the mac is concerned does exist when i connect it. I believe its a win only drive (will have to check the specs on it) but it works on the win-notebooks.
so my point of reference was coming that perspective, with no additional posts I have to assume you had the correct answer. have a great day.

My MBP won't recognize my external hard drive

I have an external hard drive that used to work just fine on my MBP, but now it won't recognize it. When I plug it in (USB), the green light turns on the hard drive, but nothing happens on my MBP. Maybe it is recognizing but not letting me know? I did check disk utility but it's not there either.

Drives "unmounted" sometimes suffer volume structure damage or similar. Sometimes it's correctable without re-formatting the drive, but not always. Depending on whether or not it contains stuff you want to keep, I'd think you have two choices:
1. If you don't mind losing what's on it: Reformat the drive (which will erase the contents), using Disk Utility, or just accept the "initialize" option you are offered.
2. If you want to try to retain the drive's contents, you'll have to try to repair the disk by whatever means available to you. Disk Utility (which is part of the OS, so you own it already), DiskWarrior, and TechTool Pro may be able to detect the drive. If so, try to Repair Disk, Repair Volume Structure, etc. If the disk can't be recognized, you'll probably have to resort to the previous method.
But if this doesn't work, wait for more advice before doing anything rash, as others may think of things I didn't.

Playing music from iCloud on Macbook Pro without external hard drive

I have iTunes match set up on my macbook pro. All my music is physically stored on an external hard drive and is perfectly matched to iCloud. So I can stream/download all my music to my iphone and ipad no problem.
I would have thought as all my music is now in the cloud i should be able to, for example, take my macbook on holiday and not have to bring the hard drive that all the music is on with me.
This doesn't seem the case - if my hard drive is not attached - it "can't locate" the song.
Am I missing something really obvious here? Is there an icloud mode I have to switch it too?
I've tried turning off itunes match (restarting) and logging in again without the hard drive connected but it still seems to be looking for the music locally.
Any thoughts?
PS - I have the latest iTunes and am using Mountain Lion

I have just worked this out.
Just created a new library by clicking option while opening iTunes. Then just turned on itunes match with this new library.
Works fine.

My bran new Mac Pro, won't recognize my external hard drive?

Hello,
I just got the new mac pro about a month ago (the cylindrical kind) it has 16 MGs of ram and 250 GBs. I got a 2 TB external hard drive for time machine, and i already have a 500 GB portable hard drive for transferring files. They worked fine initially, but the computer has stopped seeing them all together. I've already restarted my computer several times. I plug them in, they light up, but the icon doesn't appear on the desktop or finder or even in disk utility. I've tested my portable drive on my laptop and it works fine, so its not the external hard drive or the cords. I also tested a flash drive and an external CD drive in the USB ports and they work fine, so i've deduced that its not a hardware issue. The best i can come up with is that its a softwear issue, but i have no idea how that would even work. Has anyone else heard of this?
On a side note: before the computer stopped reading my hard drives, they kept unplugging themselves and saying "this hard drive was not removed properly" and then they would reappear without me touching them. I'm pretty sure this is the root of the problem. I'm out of ideas and google hasn't revealed anything to me, so if anyone knows whats going on i would really appreciate it.
Thanks.

Neither hard drive is working on the mac pro. They do not appear in disk utility.
My chords seem fine. I don't have another cable to try on the Mac Pro. but both cables worked on my 2011 macbook pro with my external hard drive. my 2TB didn't work on my macbook pro however... it didn't even appear in disk utility. I wonder though if that has to do with the usb 3. I know my laptop has USB 2 and my external hard drive is USB 3 and i'm not sure if its backwards compatible.
I have tried all of the USB ports on the Mac Pro, the hard wear seems fine.
I will try resetting the SMC shortly and see if that works.

My macbook won't recognize my external hard drive.

I have just bought my new macbook, but have some problems with the 300Gb external hard drive. There are 4 partitions on that respectively of sizes 10, 60,90 and 120Gb. When I connect it to my macbook by the USB2 cable, only the the first partition formatted as FAT32 shows up while the three others don't even mount. According to Disk Utility, these three volumes are formatted as NTFS. It gives me the folowing messages respictively when I try to verify or repair each of those three volumes:
** Reporting that the volume is fine without checking anything.
** /usr/local/bin/ntfsfix has been disabled because of volume corruption issues.
** If you still want to try fixing your volume, use /usr/local/bin/ntfsfix from the command line...
Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed.
I tried both Macfuse and Paragon to read/write NTFS formatted volume on MAC but no success yet:(
BTW There's some thing wierd about the format. In my windows XP the format of all the three volumes are said to be FAT32. I have no problem in mounting them there!
Any help by you is highly appreciated.

Start a Finder window and on the menubar, Finder > Preferences > General Tab > check External disks.
Regards,
Captfred

IMac won't boot if external hard drive running Time Machine powered on

Upon rebooting, my iMac 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB RAM, running OS X 10.5.4, locked up in a gray screen, the "gray screen of death."
At the recommendation of the Apple Tech Support rep, I turned off the iMac using the power button, and rebooted with my USB and Firewire devices removed.
The iMac boots fine with everything except my G-tech drive 1GB external hard drive running Time Machine with no partitions, attached using a Firewire 800 cable.
If the external hard drive is on, I get the interminable gray screen.
If I boot with the external hard drive powered off and then power it on after I'm at the Mac desktop, the disc image mounts normally on the desktop.
I've already repaired all disc permissions and it doesn't help.
My external hard drive has used 907 of the 931 GB true capacity. Supposedly, Time Machine removes the old files to make room for the new files.
Time Machine itself is running properly once I get my iMac booted in this peculiar way.

Raja,
Do a SMC reset perhaps even a couple of times and see if that helps. Also in System Preferences + Startup Disk make sure the internal HD is selected.
SMC RESET
Shut down the computer.
Unplug the computer's power cord and all peripherals.
Press and hold the power button for 5 seconds.
Release the power button.
Attach the computers power cable.
Press the power button to turn on the computer.
PRAM RESET
Shut down the computer.
Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command, Option, P, and R. You will need to hold these keys down simultaneously in step 4.
Turn on the computer.
Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys. You must press this key combination before the gray screen appears.
Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for the second time.
Release the keys.
Roger

MacBook Air won't recognize iOmega External Hard Drive

I just bought my macbook air and I wanted to transfer my data over from my old MacBook. The MacBook died so I was using my backup. The problem is that the Air won't recognize the ext hard drive. I connected the ext hard drive to my AirPort Extreme for the migration assistant but I keep getting a connection failed message. I tried plugging in the drive to the air directly using USB but it won't recognize it at all. The drive won't mount. The drive begins spinning and the light is on so the drive does work. It always worked with my old MacBook. I did alway connect it with FireWire so could that cause a problem since I have to connect it with USB to the Air?

I had a similar issue with mine but it was because I tried to connect to an external drive that was already connected to my iMac via FW800. When I disconnected the FW cable and plugged in the USB, everything worked perfectly.

Boot Camp: Windows stuck on startup when external hard drive is attached

Hi all,
I have Windows XP installed with Boot Camp. All was working fine (even though I installed Service Pack 3 and THEN the Boot Camp update), but today I received an external hard drive I ordered for use with Time Machine. It's a Western Digital My Book (500GB) connected via Firewire 800. This was working fine in Leopard (of course) but when I restart and go into Windows, the startup process freezes at the Windows XP logo (the animation continues though).
I've spend hours scouring the internet and I understand that the external drive is being mistaken for the boot drive, and Windows being WIndows doesn't think to try my internal hard drive after the external clearly has no boot information on it! I don't appear to be able to change the boot order in BIOS as that apparently isn't available.
Does anyone have any thoughts on this? I'm just trying to avoid unplugging the hard drive on every restart into Windows.
Thanks in advance!
Ed

happens to my firewire 400 drives too (although it didnt used to until SP3 upgrade...). My 2 cents: the fix is not worth it; just unplug it during startup of windows and plug in when it's booted.

How To Back up Macbook Pro without External Hard Drive...

how do I back up my Macbook Pro mid 2012 model on 10.9.2 OSX, without an external hard drive ? Can I use Google Drive or Dropbox ?

Google Drive and Dropbox work for backing up certain files, but not your entire user directory/hard drive. There are online services that are designed for that specifically, Carbonite and CrashPlan are two that are popular.

10.5.8 won't detect any external hard drives

I want to update my 10.5.8 Macbook Pro which I bought in 2008. It runs incredibly slow, and I want to reformat it before updating with Snow Leopard. The problem is that my computer won't detect any external disc drives, so I can't back up my important files. Is there any way to fix this, or is there something I'm missing?
I'm also wondering if I'll be able to reformat without my original OSX install disc that came with my computer, and if so, how? Thanks in advance.

If you are going to be upgrading to OS X Snow Leopard, the installer for that should be able to format your drive for you before you do the installation. I'm assuming that you have those CD's for your computer as you need discs to be able to ugrade to Snow Leopard. What happens when you plug in an external drive? Does it just not recognize the drive, or do you just not have it selected to show the drive on your desktop? With Finder being the top window, click on the Finder Menu and select preferences > select general in the tabs at the top and then make sure that External discs is checked.

Macbook pro won't recognise WD External hard drive

Have just purchased a macbook pro and it won't recognise my Western Digital external hard drive!!
It appears as 'Time Machine Backups' and doesn't show all my photos and music files. (deleting and reformatting WD hard drive not an option)
Can anyone help??
Many thanks

Sorry, meant deleting hard drive contents not an option, if required to do so to reformat.
Thanks

Files won't copy to external hard drive

I've never had this problem in 20+ years of Mac use.
I have an external 4TB hard drive, which is coming on 80% full. Sill have about 800 gigs left to go.
I have a DVD with about a dozen old TV shows in AVI format on it. No copy protection or anything unusual, just plain normal AVIs.
I highlight the content and drag to move the AVIs over to the hard drive.
All the files copy, but just as it's finishing a few of them disappear again. I try to click and drag just the individual rogue files ... they copy nicely ... then disappear again just as the copying finishes.
Just at random, I created another empty folder withint the target folder on the external drive and dragged the files to the newest folder. Suddenly it works!
This is unnerving, having some files copy but not others ... and then they DO copy when I create another random folder to put them in.
I just noticed that the external hard drive is Windows NT File System formatted ... which I did not think to reformat to Mac before moving 3TB of data over to it. I've read that Windows NTFS is buggy with invisible files and files that won't delete and problems like that.
I have another new 4TB drive which I have not used yet. If I format that one to Mac extended journalled, and then move the 3+TB of data folders over, will I just be importing the same problem with the data? Or will the transfer to a Mac formatted drive suddenly cure the problem?
-JOHN

What happens when you try? Do you get a message? If so what is it exactly?
How is the external hard drive formatted? Control (right) - click on the drive's icon and select Get Info from the contextual menu. In the Info window will be the formatting information.

OSX won't reboot if external hard drive is connected

Hi I've had my Lacie 500gig Big Disk for a while now, but just recently I've been having reboot problems. I just get the light grey screen at startup, but no Apple logo or anything....just stuck at grey. If I disconnect my external hard drive though, the Mac reboots just fine. Any thoughts on what the problem is? I've run "Verify Disk" from Disk Utility and have no problems. Anything else I can do to diagnose the problem?
FYI, the external drive is partitioned in 2 parts: 250gig for full backup (using .mac Backup) and the other 250gig is where my iTunes Library lives.
Chris

"No repair was neccessary"
Of course I had to quit iTunes before I ran the "Repair Disk", otherwise I get an error saying "could not unmount disk". I assume that's because of iTunes and the iTunes Library being located on the external.

FCP Won't Startup Without External Hard Drive

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for