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

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Firewire External Harddrive not Mounting

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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.

Installing a Firewire External Disk Drive - Issue

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I am running OS 10.4.7 and my external hard drive will not mount. I went back to the install CD and tried that but it says that it needs a system folder in order to complete the installation. Where can I find this sort of folder? Do I need to download any new software updates or any drivers?
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Here's the strange thing. Boot up Mavericks....not mountable. Not visible in Disk Utility.
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Have you tried opening your project through your external hard drive. Go into it, open the file Final Cut Projects
and double click your project. It should launch it.
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How to connect an external harddrive with firewire 800 to a macbook with firewire 400?

Hello,
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There are many adaptors, try here

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Firewire 800. Ethernet hard drives are very unlikely to provide an uninterrupted flow of video.
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Way to mount FireWire external HDs so I can access remotely?

This is either not possible, or I am totally looking in the wrong place. I have three FireWire external HDs that are chained, then plugged into an iMac G4 running 10.4.11, then mounted to the desktop. File sharing is on, along with Remote Access, Remote Login, etc. in the Control Panel.
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If you're external HDs are mounted as a local volume, that should up under Devices in the Finder window. Does it? If so, then in Preferences->Sharing->File Sharing, you should be able to add that volume as a Shared Folder. Is that what is giving you trouble? (I don't have an external HD, so can't test it).
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Firewire external hard drives no longer mount

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Fairview
iMac Mac OS X (10.3.9) G4
iMac Mac OS X (10.3.9) G4

fairview:
The next step is to see if it is directory related and Repair Disk:
Insert Installer disk and Restart, holding down the "C" key until grey Apple appears.
Go to Installer menu (Panther and earlier) or Utilities menu (Tiger) and launch Disk Utility.
Select your HDD (manufacturer ID) in the left panel.
Select First Aid in the Main panel.
(Check S.M.A.R.T Status of HDD at the bottom of right panel, and report if it says anything but Verified)
Click Repair Disk on the bottom right.
If DU reports disk does not need repairs quit DU and restart.
If DU reports errors Repair again and again until DU reports disk is repaired.
If DU reports errors it cannot repair you will need to use a utility like Tech Tool Pro or Disk Warrior
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cornelius

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Today, I've installed Arch for the first time after two years with Ubuntu. It seems to be working pretty well, but I've got a problem while mounting my external harddrive. The disc is has to partition, one formatted as ext3 and one as NTFS. Both partition shows up at the desktop, but after a while I get an error message concerning that the NTFS-partition cannot be mounted. It still appears as mounted, but I can't get access to it. The ext3-partition seems to be working, but when I try to copy a folder, the whole system freezes, and I haven't found any other things to do than pressing te power off-button.
$ tail -f var/log/messages.log
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Jan 21 04:01:18 hauge logger: ACPI action undefined: ADP1
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My /etc/fstab looks like:
# /etc/fstab: static file system information
# <file system> <dir> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
none /dev/pts devpts defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
#/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 ro,user,noauto,unhide 0 0
#/dev/dvd /mnt/dvd udf ro,user,noauto,unhide 0 0
/dev/sda1 /boot ext2 defaults 0 1
/dev/sda2 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/sda3 / ext2 defaults 0 1
/dev/sda4 /home ext2 defaults 0 1
Does anyone have an idea on what to do with this problem?

You do perhaps have to include the partitions in the fstab file. This could help you:
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fstab
You want to mount /dev/sdb1 (ext3) and /dev/sdb2 (ntfs) to any folders preferably in /mnt. You will have to create them as root. Have a look at
ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/
Maybe you want to mount from there as this method is not dependent on the order and usb port number you plug it in. For ntfs you can choose
noauto,uid=1000,gid=100,umask=027
as mount options in fstab if your user-id is 1000.

External Harddrive, time machine issue

alright im sure this is gonna seem sorta confusing but here it goes. right now i have a 160GB hard drive, and 40 GB of stuff on my 250GB external harddrive. all of it is full. and now i was wondering if i could back up the 200 GB of info (160 on hard drive and 40 on external) onto my external hardrive using time machine because i have i still have 210 GB left on my hard drive. hopefully this makes sense. thanks!

First, if you have 210 GB of free space and wish to backup 200GB of data, it won't work - the TM backup drive should be about twice as big as what you want to back up to allow for expansion as newer backups are made.
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You can have files on your external drive and also use the rest of the external's free space to backup your 160GB internal drive.

How do I get my external harddrive (NTFS) to work on Mavericks?

Since I upgraded to Mavericks, I cannot get my external harddrive to work on my laptop. I removed MacFuse and NTFS-3G from System Preferences but the problem is still there i.e. the harddrive content remains read-only. What do I need to do to get the problem sorted?

Hi faltay
I solved a similar issue NTFS hard drives don't mount
Try to see if it was the same issue for you. Luck!

FireWire external drives and bootable DVD's

I have 2 Mac Pro running 10.5.2 with all recent updates:
1) Mac Pro *****UXYL model MacPro3,1 (early 2008)
2) Mac Pro *****00PX model MacPro1,1 ROM de démarrage : MP11.005D.B00
On the second I can mount and boot with a FireWire external drive. I can also use an utility DVD or CD like DiskWarrior.
On the first one, nothing of this is possible : I cannot mount a FireWire drive only an USB drive. I cannot use CD or DVD bootables except of course Install Disks (version 1.1)
I tried to obtain an answer from Apple support without any success.
<post edited by host>

The ROM has been reported in the past to be one element of the issue, but in general Apple has made it abundently clear that you can't install an older operating system on a Mac nor boot from an older operating system than the Mac than came with it in these two articles:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303315
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25517
And as far as I know no one has been able to downgrade the ROM to an older version than it shipped with either to force boot an older operating system.

External harddrive is slow

Hello there
I have a MacBook Pro Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2Ghz with Mac OS X 10.5.4, and Im experiencing slow data transfers from my Western Digital My Book 500gb external harddrive. This results in video-lag when trying to play dvd or other video files from that harddrive. I have searched forums for help on this, but cannot find any solutions. Do you know what I can do to fix this? By the way, the filesystem is ntfs-3g.

I don't believe it is a fragmentation problem. It is extremely unlikely that a drive used to store large video files would become fragmented enough to cause your problem. It sounds as if your computer is not recognizing your drive as USB2.0 and is mounting it as a USB1.1 drive. The issue is addressed in this thread, unfortunately there is no permanent solution as of yet. Some have reported that unmounting, disconnecting, and reconnecting the drive fixes the problem temporarily.
Good Luck!
-Cliff

Which external harddrive?

I'm looking at buying an external harddrive for my macbook which and wanted to ask a couple of questions. firstly if i have a bus powered external harddrive will it become a drain on my macbook if the macbook itself is plugged in and secondly can anyone recommend a good external hardrive. i use mainly audio recording and producing software so i'd prefer a fast drive of 7200rpm, usb2 connected and if someone knows of one that can be both bus powered with the option of plugging it into the mains would be great. thanks in advance for anyone who can offer some good tips.

bus powered drives will only be 2.5" hard drives, which have a max capacity of 160GB, the tradeoff is the 5,400RPM. 2.5" drives only come in 100GB max for the 7,200RPM models.
Bus powered drives do drain the power out of your macbook, but if your computer is plugged in thats not an issue. theyre easier to travel with because its just one cable. since your macbook has firewire, its probably best to just go with that anyway, since it has better data transfer.
if youre looking for higher capacity and still have the 7,200RPM youll have to go with a 3.5" SATA drive. you arent obligated to get one of the prebuilt external drives. you can get a good drive enclosure from otherworldcomputing.com and get any 3.5" hard drive you wish to install. you can do likewise for 2.5" models.
i dont recall external drives that allow you to use both bus and AC power or either one. it may exist, but i dont think it does.
LaCie makes good external portable hard drives. they have both USB and Firewire versions and have a 7,200RPM spindle speed. but again youre only going to find 100GB as your max capacity. the Firelite external drive is pretty good too, and it too has USB. i think both are available in the apple store online. but you can find tons of other things on OtherWorldComputing.com

Firewire external harddrives mounting issues

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