Firewire External Harddrive not Mounting

I recently bought a 1TB Seagate internal drive and put it into a casing, and have been using it for Time Machine backups on my white Macbook. I was using FireWire, but all of a sudden the harddrive either doesn't mount at all, or if it does, the backups stall and never finish. It works fine through USB. I tried rebooting the computer, rebooting the harddrive, and clearing my computer's pRAM. When I first started using the harddrive, I was using a basically completely fresh install of Leopard (10.5.6).
This is only the first time I've tried to use the FireWire port on my computer since I bought it in summer 2007, so I'm wondering if maybe the port itself is faulty. Is there any way to determine if this is the case? Should I just take the computer and the harddrive to the Apple Store? Any advice will be helpful at this point. Thanks.

You might want to check your firewire cable, too. It seems that the drive is working (since it can back-up through USB) so the next step in the chain is the Firewire cable. If you have a second one, try that. If not, borrow one (if you can) and see if that fixes the problem. Most cables that I have used are pretty good, but, on occasion, you can get one that either has been stepped on or damaged in some way.
The mac checks internal operations first before it looks at peripherals (your external hard drive) so, if you were having a problem with the drive or the cable to the drive, it would stop the start-up operation there.
If you have some other device that uses the firewire port you might want to try that too, just to see if the port is having some problem. I would use a digital video camera and iMovie to see if it can see the camera or not.

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Firewire external harddrives mounting issues

I searched and have not found any helpful(to me) info on the problems with firewire harddrives not mounting. Just for the info, I have a 320G dual connection Western Digital my book premium edition external hard drive. as others, it won't mount via firewire, but will vis USB. It doesn't show up in system profiler or Disk Utility either When it's connected via firewire. I had suggestions to disconnect,unplug and shut down the harddrive and the imac. wait several minutes, and restart and reconnect. That did nothing. Should I return this harddrive for another brand? I want to keep it as I picked it up dirt cheap on sale, and with rebates, instant savings, etc. it was only $109. And no I don't want to just use it with USB, I want firewire.

Hi Tcimac
It is often difficult to determine a users' specific knowledge level after a few posts.
There are folks that come here looking for help that have never had a computer, and if they did, perhaps someone else like a child or grandchild got them up and running and they are left to their own devices when troubleshooting.
I am sure that those to whom that article was directed do not feel like those are simple steps at all and are often very thankful for the document.
Be thankful for what you do know. Do not forget that to some your question may be equally received-
-DaddyPaycheck

Firewire drive will not mount

Firewire drive will not mount USB mounts fine.

It's nearly impossible to offer any help given the dearth of information you provided.
What Mac are you using? What external FireWire hard drive are you trying to use? Is it a FW-400 or FW-800 interface? Have you tried any other FireWire device with that computer? Have you tried that FireWire drive with any other computer?

Firewire drive will not mount on PowerBook

Firewire drive will not mount on PowerBooks
Posted: May 2, 2006 8:09 AM
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Hi All,
A friend of mine has a Titanium Powerbook G4 500's with 640mb ram and OS 10.2. She has purchased a Fantom Drive 120gb Firewire drive to back up her work. The drive will not mount on her machine. It will mount on my G5 running 10.3.9. I went to the Fantom Site, and all I could find was a link to Apple's site on Tiger.
She bought a set of Panther disks and wanted to back up all of her stuff before the upgrade.
Any help would be appreciated,
David

Thought you could use this info about getting FireWire to work!
First, you should always Repair Permissions in Disk Utility before and after any update; I would do that now. If you installed your update with FireWire plugged in, your Mac may not recognize it anymore.
Try resetting your FireWire ports by disconnecting all FW devices, shut down your Mac and unplug it from AC power (wall socket) for 30 minutes. plug it back in and try FW.
If that did'nt 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. Hers should be the 10.2.8 Combo update. Others reading, download the Combo that applies to your system.
If that still did'nt 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.
For those of you with Macs that are not PowerBooks or iBooks, a bad internal battery can cause FireWire to not be recognized, so make sure it's good!
Good Luck!
Cheers!
DALE

External Firewire drive does not mount on desktop now.

Greetings everyone.
G5 dual, 4.6GB ram, OSX 10.4.10, external firewire drive, formerly worked fine, now is invisible.
Not the drive. New purchase, worked fine until a restart. Not the cable. Power is getting from the G5 to the firewire drive. Not the port. I also have a firewire card instlaled so I have three ports to connect it to (and two on the FW drive). No combination works. Not the computer, the FW drive also fails to appear on an iBook. Not the OS. I did a clean install to make sure.
I'm not a newbie. I know what I'm doing. Until now! DiskWarrior, TechTool Pro, Drive Genius and Apple's Disk Utility cannot see the drive.
The FW drive is a Powerbook internal HD inserted into a case, purchased seperately.
At my wits' end. Can anyone help please.

I am suddenly having this EXACT problem. I have two Firelite firewire drives (one 60G and one 80G) that are suddenly refusing to mount on my older dual 1.25GHz G4 tower. They are also suddenly refusing to mount on my non-intel iMac. They will both mount painlessly on my new Intel MacBook Pro, but that's not much use, since the point of the firewire drives is to transfer files between these computers. I'm updating all of them to 10.4.10 to see if that's the issue...

Can somebody please please help me! External harddrive not readable due to dumb mistake!

What is quite possibly one of the dumbest decisions i ever made in my life, I disconnected my external harddrive from my imac & plugged it into a laptop that has Windows 7 to trasfer footage from there to my imac more quicker. I clciked an option that allowed me to assign a letter to it to it can be read by the laptop (however, I would of needed to format the harddrive which I thankfully didn't). Please understand that erasing the entire harddrive is NOT an option! I am a filmmaker & I have so many years of work on there, including videos, music, & documents.
When the computer starts up I get hit with "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer"! I tried Disk Utiity & even though it recognizes the drive's existence, I cannot repair or mount...nor can I access any of the files! I also tried Diskwarrior & got "directory cannot be rebuilt, the file system is unsupported".
If theres anything you guys can do to help me, please do so. My life was on that harddrive & losing it would be the most devistating thing I could ever experience. A movie I finished not too long ago...is also on that harddrive. I'll send you a full video completely thanking you for your help!

Call a professional data recovery service such as DriveSavers. Their services are very expensive, but without backups, you have no choice but to pay whatever they ask.

External drives not mounting

My external drives are not mounting on my desktop. When I chekck my about this mac, more info, system report, firewire the message is Warning: Unable to list FireWire devices.
Just out of the blue my FireWire 800 externals don't mount? Have mounted all of them to my MacBookPro no problem. Not daisey chained simple front and back worked just fine now nothing.
Anyone have a solution?
Thanks in advance,
Mark

Mine take a very very long time to mount then they will not sleep even when unmounted. The firewire driver in Mavericks needs some work. If at all possible, I would use USB until the driver get's resolved.

Seagate goflex 2TB external drive not mounting Yosemite.

Hello:
I have been using a Seagate golfer 2TB external HD for time machine since 2012. No problem with subsequent OS X upgrades. My last backup was performed 3 months ago in an iMac with Mavericks. Today I have a new iMac with Yosemite. Due to the new iMacs does not have firewire connectors, I had to buy an Apple adaptor from FW to Thunderbolt. When I plugged in the HD it did not mount. Checked the cables, changed HD connector, tried my MBP, changed the cable to a USB that comes with the Seagate and nothing happened. Run disk utility and the disk appears, but the information related to storage, number of files is unavailable.
I checked in Seagate webpage and found a software called Seagate dashboard. I installed it and run test feature. After the test the HD finally mounted but came with a warning that says something like this: "OS X could not repair the disk. Backup your data and reformat the drive". Run disk utility and all the info appeared. However, when I run migration assistant to migrate all my data to the new mac, the app does not find the external HD. Tried to run Time machine and it is not found, either. The only thing that I could do is to double click the icon in desktop and found that the Backups.backupdb file is there with all my backups.
Considering that the external drive is having problem, my question is: Can I "move" the Backups.backupdb file to the desktop of the new iMac, repair or erase the external HD using disk utility and then move again the Backups.backupdb file to the EHD to see if it works?.
Thanks.
Franklin.

Thanks Dan.
While I waited for an answer I decide to install a Seagate app called "Seagate Dashboard". This app have a feature that "test" your HD. I run it and I got a message that said something like I the disk has damaged and has to be repaired, please back up your data. After that the HD finally mounted in my desktop.
So, ok I have a dilemma: try to enter in my HD and drag the files I needed or pay a specialist to fix my problem. I chose the first one, drag and drop.
And finally I had success. I could enter in the backup the Time machine did and drag all the files I needed. As a matter of fact, I tried to use Migration Assistant and it worked perfectly.
My conclusion: I had luck, the pure one.
Now I decided to have two back-up instead of one. And accident can happen again I could not have the same fortune.

After Leopard upgrade external drive not mounting

Ok, after finally getting through the dead blue screen issue I have Leopard up and running.
New problem, my external USB hard drive (I/O Magic 80GB USB 2.0) will not mount. I've used this drive up to and including the day I started the upgrade as my backup drive. Now when I plug it in it does not mount, I cannot see it listed in Disk Utility and it does not show up in the System Profiler. Can anyone suggest what I need to do to get this to work?

Update:
I brought it (third time's a charm?) to the Apple Store once again: the iMac, the WD My Book, my cables, etc. They tried it; no luck. They tried the My Book in their computer (think it was a MacBook running Leopard) with my cable; showed up no prob.
One other interesting thing this tech did was look in Apple Profiler for Firewire, where there was an odd Warning in red that no Firewire devices could be found. (This while plugged in to 400 Firewire port w my cable.) Then tried it plugged in to my iMac w 800 Firewire cable; voila! It appeared! Then tried another device in the 400 slot; it showed up fine. (huh?) Tried a different 400 FW cable w My Book in iMac, no luck.
The tech looked bemused. He sold me an 800 FW cable and told me to try sending the cable back to Western Digital.
Meanwhile, twelve days after contacting WD about this problem, they responded with this link:
Thank you for contacting Western Digital Customer Service and Support and I apologize for the delayed response.
We have seen a couple of issues with Leopard.
The following link Addresses formatting issues with certain drives used with Time Machine
(specifically, single-partition MBR drives greater than 512 GB in size as well as NTFS drives of any size and partition scheme). http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306907
The following link addresses the latest release updates to the Leopard operating system 10.5.1. http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/11/12/latestmac_os_x_10_5_1_build_fixes_finder_data_lossissue.html
I haven't used Time Machine yet (will get different external for that if I decide to) so the second link was more applicable to my situation.
I did just install 10.5.1 a couple days ago, it didn't resolve this for me; since other devices worked in the 400 port, the tech thought perhaps it was a software issue...<grin>
Hope others have equally simple solutions..

External drive not mounting after crash

I had the finder lock up on me and I had to force a restart.
At the time an external USB2 drive was plugged in. Since the forced restart the external drive is not mounting. It won't mount via USB2 or Firewire. It is formatted as Mac OS Extended.
Upon booting the computer notifies that it can't be read and asks to initialize, ignore or eject.
The system profiler sees it. Disk Utility sees it but it won't allow the options to verify or repair to be used.
Disk warrior, Drive 10, and Disk Rescue won't allow the drive to be fixed unless its mounted. In fact the drive won't even appear as an option in those programs without mounting.
So what do I have left to try?

After trial and error and moving the drive around to various enclosures I had Disk Utility open up the options to verify and repair.
It wouldn't actually fix it or go through the whole process of fixing it but that was enough to let a boot from the Disk Warrior CD see the drive as an option.
I only recovered about 60% of what was originally on it after DW redid the directory but it was at least something.
One question though what sort of issues could my boot drive's directory have that would effect the external ones? Is the corruption the fault of the internal drive?
I ask because although I've been assured that it will work fine I am running a 160G drive in a machine that only sees the first 128GB as the boot drive. I am not 100% positive that won't have some side effects but everyone around here seems to tell me its all good and that I shouldn't worry about that. Its this belief that makes me use the external drive as my torrent media drive since there is so much more reading and writing being done to it.

Seagate Goflex external drive not mounting

Upgraded to Yosemite with no problems. However my Seagate 3tb external drive will not mount, but it is recognized in the disk utility and it is recognized on a pc but will not mount? Is there anything I can do? I tried the goflex thunderbolt dock, Ive tried usb, Ive plugged it into an older imac with 10.7 on it and it says "unrecognizable drive" and gives me options to initialize or eject. Is there anything I can use to just get these files off of here on win or osx?
I have also plugged in two 1tb drives seagate and toshiba and they both work perfectly. And, I have also updated the thunderbolt drivers and all that... I am at a loss of what to do next.

Okay found out the problem, on my exfat formatted drive, after I upgraded to Yosemite it basically created a new partition, a corrupted partition and would not mount my drive. However, I could open it and see it in Disk Utility.
Here's what I did to fix it:
Goto disk utility to see the name of you drive.
Open Terminal and type: sudo fsck_exfat -d disk1s1(this should be the name of your disk)
It will ask for your password then press, enter and it will display all files on the disk.
Then is will ask: Main boot drive needs to be updated?
Type: Yes
It will update and say that you can repair disk in disk utility.
Do that, and it will show up on the desktop.
Link to original forum post if you need more information:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4154638?start=0&tstart=0
Hope this helps, it was a headache for about a week but, Ive read osx does not handle exfat formatting very well.

Firewire external writer not seen by Windows 7

I have Windows 7 x64 running very sweetly in my MacBook Pro 2.2 on a Kingston SSD 128 V series. I installed the X64 drivers from the SL disk as detailed elsewhere in this forum.
Everything is working except a Freecom LS Pro external DVD writer, when connected by firewire. Windows 7 simply doesn't see it. Not in Device Manager or anywhere. Fine connected USB.
The same LS Pro works fine with firewire in a Vista Bootcamp partition on my Mac Pro, and on the Mac partition on the MBP.
Firewire external hard drives work fine on the Windows 7 partition.
It looks like a missing driver for firewire DVD writer in Windows 7 bootcamp.
Will I have to wait for the imminent new Bootcamp release, or is there another solution?
Anyone have the same problem?

I managed to work out why iTunes couldn't see the ext writer [I didn't check it in the drop down menu...]
So, although I didn't manage to get AIFF files written to the disc to work on my CD player... the situation is now resolved.

External harddrive not detected?

I have an Avastor HDX 500GB firewire external that was given to me used. It was working fine for about a month until I gave it to someone with a brand new MacBook Pro (I have a G5 PowerPC) and they moved data in and out of the device.
It was working fine on the Pro the night it was returned to me, but the next morning my computer wouldn't detect it. System Profiler is telling me its there, but won't let me access any files and doesn't show up on the desktop or in Finder.
I've read about Disk Utility, but I'd really like to avoid wiping the drive.

Welcome to Discussions - it may be that your friend changed the formatting of the drive, and it now is unreadable by a PPC Mac.
Can you get your friend to mount your drive on his/her computer, so that your data can be moved to that computer, you can then reformat the drive in Mac OS extended and then move your data back to the reformatted drive?

Old Library on External Harddrive not recognised on new PC for iTunes

Hi, I've just bought a new pc after my old one gave up one me. I have my iTunes library saved to an external harddrive and I've changed the Library name to that of my harddrive location in Prefences>General>Library Name. I also changed The Preferences Advanced tab>iTunes Music folder location to point to the external harddrive location where my music files are and no music appears in my library. All I want is my library off my ipod to be replicated back into the itunes library as i've a lot of history here. Can it be done?

MACROSTATE wrote:
I have all of my iTunes media on an external HD that I access wirelessly. Been running it like this for a long time off my MacBook Pro without a problem.
Yesterday I got a new iMac and followed the steps to connect my new iMac's iTunes to the remote library. When I go to Prefs > Advanced > Change iTunes Media Folder Location, I can see the folder with my iTunes content, but the content does not show up in iTunes after I select the folder.
on the iMac, launch iTunes with the options key pressed. this window will appear
select choose and navigate to the iTunes library file on your external HD.
any joy ?

External Drive not mounting anymore. HELP!

I was messing with permissions. I was trying to restrict others from using my external drive. I do know that I never removed myself. Now I see that my external LaCie 250GB drive will not mount. Both 'Disk Utility' and 'Disc Warrior' see and 'repair' the hard drive, but it still does NOT mount on the desktop. What can I do? Please help!
Robert
Dual 2.5 GHz G5 Mac OS X (10.4.3) 60GB Video iPod

I opened a 'Terminal' window and discovered that it appears I changed the owner. My username is bobbysteele. I changed it from 'admin' to my username (it's truncated - bobbyste). The permissions on the external drive are as follows:
d---rwx--- 16 bobbyste bobbyste 646 Jan 7 08:01 Jukebox01
It appears the permissions should be drwxr-xr-x because that is the setting for all other drives and folders. How can I change the permissions? Please help.

Firewire External Harddrive not Mounting

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