G4733DA w/ 4 internal HD's sometimes won't mount/boot to alternate HD-Why?

I own a G4 733 DA w/ 4 internal HD's which sometimes won't mount/boot to an alternate HD on an internal Sonnet PCI controller card (position 1 only).
I can also boot to either of the 2 HD's on the sonnet pci controller card (even though neither shows up on system profiler in OS X.4.10). One of which is a Seagate 7200rpm, 400GB which I am currently booted to right now (it's in slot 2 of the sonnet pci card and works fine) However, at times the HD on slot 1 refuses to mount on the desktop. When I remove the same hard drive it mounts fine on an ext. FW enclosure.
Is it possible that slot one on this sonnet pci card is starting to go out? And how do I know for certain since neither of the HD's on this Sonnet pci controller card show up on system profiler? Is this normal? Shouldn't every hard drives show up in Apple's system profiler? Even the ones on the pci controller card? Should I just try a separate HD on the same slot and see what happens? I have all of the drives cloned to a much larger ext. FW HD so I'm not really worried about loss of data since I have all drives backed up to ext. FW HD's.

Neither of the HD's on this Sonnet pci controller card show up on system profiler. Is this normal?
Yes, it is normal. Earlier versions (before Panther) of System Profiler would show the drives connected to a Sonnet PCI controller, but current versions just show the controller itself. Disk Utility should show the drives.
Each port on the Sonnet card can have up to two drives, one Master, one Slave. The Master should be at the end of the cable. If a Western Digital drive is alone on a cable, it should be set to Single. Drives on the Sonnet card that are set to Slave are not bootable.
Try swapping cables at the Sonnet card. If the same drive has problems, then it is the drive or cable. Try swapping just the cables.

Similar Messages

Hard Drive In 2nd Internal Bay Sometimes won't mount

I recently installed a second internal drive in my computer. My main problem is sometimes the drive won't mount. If I turn off the computer for a while it will finally mount but that's not good enough. One day it may not mount at all. What I want to know is; does anybody else have this problem and if so, how did you fix it?
Or better yet, is there a command I can use in Terminal to mount the drive?
G5 Dual 2.5 GHz; 4.5 Gig Ram; Logic Pro 7.1.1 Mac OS X (10.4.5) 2nd internal 160 gig hard drive installed

Barry, make sure all of your connections are seated properly. I had this same problem with a SP 1.8 PowerMac, and the problem was that the cable was not seated well which disrupts the signals from getting to the drive. This caused the drive to mount sometimes, and not mount others. Check connections at the drive and motherboard.
Jeff Weinberg

Firefox won't save DMG files and won't mount the disk image. Why?

When I try to install a download I am asked to either save the DMG file or Open using .... I select save, but the disk image never appears on my desktop and nothing shows in the Tools-Downloads window.

See if this helps you: <br />
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Managing+file+types

Macbook won't see internal hard drive sometimes

I've got a core duo macbook that's been giving me trouble for awhile. The original hard drive crashed and I replaced it, then the new hard drive crashed and I had some issues with kernel panics, etc. I can boot off my firewire drive and it seems to work fine, but I put in a 3rd hard drive today to give it another chance, and it won't mount when I boot from the installer disk. I booted from the external hard drive, and initially the internal hard drive did not mount. The second time I opened Disk Utility, the hard drive was there, so I tried to format it, but I get the pinwheel and nothing happens. I'm running OS 10.5 with 2GB of ram. I'm thinking it's a logic board issue as I was getting kernel panics at one time, but haven't seen any lately. Any help?

When a hard drive fails to appear in Disk Utility that usually means the drive has failed. I really don't understand the purpose of the rest of your post. I don't even know what the question is, but I'm guessing you want to know if the drive should be replaced. The answer would be, "Yes."

Indesign CS4 in Mac 10.6.8, sometimes won't show files, sometimes won't show tools

Indesign CS4 in Mac 10.6.8, sometimes won't show files, sometimes won't show tools. Like I click to open a file from the finder, and Indesign makes that temporary file in the finder, but won't display the pages. At other times I can have the pages displayed but I can't open the tools such as the colour swatches or the paragraphy styles. This all happens at random, although I suspect it is more likely to happen if I have been working in some other program such as Typestyler or Aperture, and come back to Indesign. Kind of like Indesign gets snooty at me working in another program.
I've done the thing of dicing the preferences, but so far the only workaround that has worked so far is quitting and restarting the program. I don't remember this happening so much until recently, in other words the problem seems to be getting more frequent.
But I am wondering if this has happened with anyone else and if there are any other suggestions for avoiding it.
Back in the good old days you would reinstall PageMaker and that would settle things for a while. But now I don't know if a program like Indesign CS4 actually gets corrupted and if it does I don't know what to do. Does the program get corrupted? And should you reinstall a fresh copy? If it's a good idea to reinstall the program how do you do that? Is it possible to download a fresh copy? And if I do, what happens when the fresh copy phones home? I've tangled with the Adobe Microsoft corporation before when Indesign phoned home and got a crossed line.

Other things to try:
Examine your specific version of Optima by going to Type menu > Find Font, clicking on the Optima font and choosing More Info (I think) and find the specific version number. See if you can uninstall the font and reinstall another Optima font with a different, preferably newer version number. There has (historically) been a bad version of Optima floating around for years. Maybe you have it.
Use a free utility like FontNuke or FontFinagler to get your Mac OS to reset its font plists. Sometimes that makes the OS feel better.
Use the built-in Disk Utility to repair file permissions. You never know.
Export your old document out to IDML and reopen that resulting idml file back into a new freshly written INDD file. This might remove internal database corruptions.
All these are chicken-soup things to try and they might be good for you.
Best,
Mike Witherell in Florida

G5 tower now boots, but one of the internal hard drives won't mount!

For those of you who saw my previous thread, my G5 tower would turn on and play the startup chime, then sit there until the fans ramped up. It seems that the problem was the Belkin PCI card. I removed it, and the machine started up with no problems.
Now, however, one of my internal hard drives (not the primary one) won't mount. Various programs can't even tell it's there. I'm completely lost as to how to solve this problem. My first thought was to try to swap it into an external case to see if it would mount that way. Thoughts?

One, possible two posts should read ground. Test for continuity against the metal case. Another should read 5V+DC. I think the four prong are: ground, ground, illumination then power. The connectors are gold plated and should not corrode, however, they are no match against fine particles of dust. You can carefully unplug both sides of the drive connections and vacuum. Usually, to unplug and re-plug is enough to get it to work again. When there no power coming off the logic board, you can find a Y-splitter and power off the other drive.

Internal hard drive won't mount

First off, thanks in advance to any who offer help with my frustrating problem.
It would appear that my primary drive has come unmounted and will not remount. Yesterday I went to upgrade Corel Painter. The computer hung up when I launched the installer so I walked away from it for a few hours. Upon returning I found a screen telling me I had to restart. After the first restart I was looking at a Darwin command prompt (I don't know Unix, so this didn't help!). I restarted again and got the grey apple screen and a blue screen for a long time. I finally booted up from the OS X disc.
After unintentionally installing Tiger on my secondary internal drive I ran Disk Utility. My primary drive shows up in the left hand window, but greyed out. When I verify or repair the disk it tells me it passed verification and does not need to be repaired. When I try to mount the disk, it says "the disk cannot be mounted"
Looking at the additional info gives me this:
Name : Hard Drive
Type : Volume
Disk Identifier : disk0s2
Mount Point : Not mounted
File System : Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
Connection Bus : ATA
Partition Type : Apple_HFS
Device Tree : mac-io/ata-4@1f000/@0:2
Writable : Yes
Universal Unique Identifier : 0D681EDE-DA84-3486-AC05-16F7794AC9BA
Capacity : 28.0 GB (30,020,235,264 Bytes)
Owners Enabled : No
Can Turn Owners Off : Yes
Can Be Formatted : Yes
Bootable : Yes
Supports Journaling : Yes
Journaled : No
S.M.A.R.T. Status : Verified
Disk Number : 0
Partition Number : 2
I just don't understand what happened. This is the first trouble I've had since using OS X so I am lost in how to troubleshoot it. Any input would be great. I am a dummy and haven't backed up my drive in over 6 months so I am quite sad over this.
Erin
G4 450 Dual Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Have you tried mounting the partition from the command line? Even if it doesn't work, the command line sometimes gives more informative error messages. As a variation, the hint below describes how mounting a drive as "read-only" may sometimes succeed where a regular "read & write" mount might fail. If successful, it should be possible to pull files off for backup.
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20041127045644235
In another approach, if you have an external drive that is big enough to hold the entire unmountable partition (or if your secondary partition has the free space), it might be possible to use "Disk Utility.app" to create a disk image of the whole partition - try selecting the icon for the unmounted partition in the left panel, then click the "New Image" button in the toolbar. After going through various prompts, it should create a disk image called disk0s2.dmg. I have read that it is sometimes possible to mount a disk image of an unmountable disk created using this process (unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a link).

My A'Extreme sometimes won't connect to my MacBook Pro even if I have a green light on the device . I can unplug the ethernet cable and reconnect and it will work fine. all diagnostics say there is nothing wrong. Any ideas ?

My A'Extreme sometimes won't connect to my MacBook Pro even if I have a green light on the device . I can unplug the ethernet cable and reconnect and it will work fine. all diagnostics say there is nothing wrong. Any ideas ?

This is more about your modem then anything. Sometimes you'll need to unplug and plug back in your modem. Consider it a glitch from the ISP or just the modem in general.
when I need to turn something off then on I try the modem first. This when I'm not doing any ware and tare to the device.

MacBook Pro sometime won't shut down after Lion installation.

After installation of Lion my new MacBook Pro (early 2011) sometime won't shut down in the normal way and I have to shut it down using the power botton.

Make sure you quit out of all programs prior to shuting down if you have not done so.
Boot up from your install DVD and run "Repair Disk" from the Utility menu.

Cs4 crashes and sometimes won't open

I have a brand new Macbook. I transferred my old computer onto this one, and my Photoshop CS4 crashes constantly, and sometimes won't even open. I took my computer to Apple, and they said it isn't a computer issue. Adobe doesn't offer phone support for Photoshop, so I'm hoping someone here can help.

My understanding is that using Migration to move Adobe applications does not work well.
Uninstall all the Adobe software, run the Creative Cloud Cleaner Tool, and then reinstall.

I have a mid 2007 iMac and the internal superdrive audio cd won't play, the DVD works. Can I purchase an external cd drive that will work with my iMac?

I have a mid 2007 iMac (Model A1224 iMac 7,1) and the internal superdrive audio cd won't play, the DVD works. Can I purchase an external cd drive that will work with my iMac?

Welcome to the Apple Support Communities
Any external optical drive will work with your Mac. If you want an Apple USB SuperDrive, see > http://www.tuaw.com/2012/04/02/use-the-macbook-air-superdrive-with-any-almost-ma c/
The best option is to take the Mac to an Apple Store and get the Mac's SuperDrive repaired

Since upgrading to Yosemite, my wired keyboard sometimes won't type

Using MacBook Pro and 27 inch thunderbolt monitor. Since upgrading to Yosemite, my wired keyboard sometimes won't type. Have to restart to get it to work. Getting more frequent. Help?

Hi dcfrogs,
I'm sorry to hear you are having this issue since the update. If you continue to have intermittent but persistent issues with your wired keyboard, you may find the troubleshooting and isolation steps outlined in the following article helpful:
One or more keys on the keyboard do not respond - Apple Support
Regards,
- Brenden

Since upgrading to version 4.3.5 FaceTime sometime won't receive calls

Ever since I've upgraded to version 4.3.5 FaceTime sometimes won't receive a call. Sometimes it will, and I can hear ipad2 ring. I can make outgoing calls, and the other person can hear and receive my call. I also had a issue with an alarm clock app (alarm sometimes won't sound off). Everything else works fine. I've tried setting airplane mode to on, and setting FaceTime to off, shutdown to reboot. Then power up, set airplance mode back to off, and FaceTime back on. Was able to hear receiving call. After that couldn't hear the next incoming call. Is this a software issue? How could this be resolved?

I have the same problem on an iPhone 4 with 4.3.5 update.

When using iMessage on my iPad it sometimes won't let me send a iMessage unless there is a photo attached to it, how do I fix this?

When using iMessage on my iPad it sometimes won't let me send a iMessage unless there is a photo attached to it, how do I fix this?

Check Settings>Messages>Show Subject Field and make sure it's set to "Off".

Original internal HDD won't mount.

I recently had my iMac HDD upgraded from 500gig to 2TB and now I'd like to grab some old files off my original HDD. To do this I bought myself a Dynamode SATA USB docking station and ran migration assistant. MOST of the files copied across but some (my movies, a bunch of applications & some work files) didn't.
Unfortunately now it seems my machine won't mount the drive again. Is there some clever way I can force it to mount or check why it's not?

Hey Ben. A couple of obvious things to try. Restart and the try to connect. Also, when the drive is connected, open Disk Utility to see if it recognizes the drive and you may be able to mount it from there.
I've used a similar device from OWC and I found that sometimes you need to plug and unplug a few times before it's seen.
Hope it helps.

G4733DA w/ 4 internal HD's sometimes won't mount/boot to alternate HD-Why?

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for