Hard Disk Won't Mount Volume

I have a hard disk that won't mount. It was previosly part of a software mirror RAID. The raid was degraded, so I tried to rebuild the second raid mirror. THis failed, and now the master won't mount either. In TechTools, the drive is reported as being fine, but the volume still won't mount. Any suggestions? This is really setting us back a bit.
Mini, iBook, PowerMac G5, XServe G4 Mac OS X (10.4.4)

If you know what you are doing you can check out Article number 106987. If that looks too complicated for you you might want to take the computer to an Apple specialist.

Similar Messages

Hard Disk Won't Mount; Lion Wants To Initialise It - Please Help!!

Greetings All,
Disk issues! Help! Ok, I have an external RAID box (Sonnet 8 Bay SATA) with 4 pairs of RAID 1 drives. One of the pairs, 3Tb Hitachis, all of a sudden won't mount on OS X Lion. Everything was working fine, tried to save something to them, Mac refused, I restarted and the other three pairs show up, but the 3Tb Hitachi pair don't. OS X gives me the message that "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer". I've restarted the Mac and Sonnet box several times, checked that all drivers are up to date and reinstalled anyway. Have also taken the two drives out and tried to get them mounted on my Mac Pro or MacBook Pro using a FW800 dock without joy - always get the same message mentioned. Disk Warrior won't even help as when the Hitachi 3Tb is plugged in via the dock, the program hangs when it's scanning for disks. Although all the data on the drives is almost definitely backed up, I don't want to initialise / format the disks as there is a chance some video files aren't and also it'll knock FCP X as this was the primary drive where Events and Projects are stored.
Any suggestions would be thoroughly appreciated :-)
Cheers,
Edmond

Hi,
Both drives physically are working (both bought together several months ago). The Sonner RAID software shows the RAID pair as ok and doesn't report any issues or errors - it sees both drives and the RAID 1 is 100% fine. So, as far as teh RAID box is concerned, all is well and there are zero issues.
When I try plugging the drives in seperately using a dock, neither will mount and give the same error message :-(
The issue seems to be at a data / OS level. Biggest initial problem is I can't mount them to check :-(
Edmond

Time Capsule Hard Drive (hard disk) Won't Mount

I just purchased a new 1TB Time capsule. I installed the software on the disc out of the box as required, then started up TC and it installed the new Firmware 7.3.2 and I was good for internet wirelessly and via ethernet. BUT the main feature, the access to its internal 1TB Hard Drive NEVER mounts. I can't find it anywhere. Light on TC is steady green.
After reading the discussions no clues either. I tried downgrades to 7.3.1 firmware but still not Hard Drive to access anywhere.
HELP!
Kurt

Replaced the Time capsule, avoided firmware update 7.3.2 and jumped straight to 7.4.1.
Now all works fine.
truk

Hard disk won't mount

While trying to install Lion, my power failed. Now, I can't remount my internal drive. I have an external drive with Time Machine backup if I can get the disk to mount. Any suggestions?

You can try starting up from your Snow Leopard Install DVD and run Disk Utility.
At least you can see what state your internal drive is in and whether it can be salvaged.
If it can't be resurrected, you may have to startover with an install of Snow Leopard followed by Lion.

External hard drive won't mount, even after disk repair.

My Toshiba external hard drive won't mount on my MacBook Pro 10.8.5. I can see it in my disk repair, and when I repair, "the partition map appears to be ok." But I can't access the icon to be able to open the hard drive contents on my desktop. Help!

Hello maccynicwhoalwayshasmacs,
Thanks for the question. After reviewing your post, it sounds like trouble with an external HD mounting. I would recommend that you read this article, it may be able to help you resolve or isolate the issue.
USB and FireWire Quick Assist
Thanks for using Apple Support Communities.
Have a nice day,
Mario

External Hard Drive Won't Mount- Need to recover files

Hello Everyone,
I am hoping that one of you fine mac experts may be able to assist ~
Problem: External Seagate FreeAgent Desktop USB external hard drive
won't mount on desktop=ie: no access to my important files.. Please Help!
Details:
External seagate freeagent 500 GB Desktop USB HD ( only 2 months old)
(using for document / file backup-not as a startup disc)
on my Mac G3 350 MZ Blue & White Tower /768 ram/ running OSX 10.1.5 & OS9.2~
~
Problem: Started using the external 500 GB HD 2 months ago -with no problems-until this morning. Tried to double click to open it to access files
and got the "beach ball of death" and needed to restart.
My trusty G3 started up fine, however, the external HD was now
not showing up on the desktop as normal. I troubleshooted -by restarting,
trying different a/c plugs/ different USB ports , ran disk utility..called
seagate -not much help . Seagate said to try the HD on another mac-which I did-
a G5 tower- same problem.
~
The External hard drive will show up in disk utility, but is grayed out.
and when click "mount" same two messages keep showing:
message 1: "a disk attempting to mount as unknown has failed verification or has failed to
mount.please use disk utility to check the disk"
~
message 2- when unplugging and repluggin the usb in-and upon
restart:" you have inserted a disk containg no volumes that mac osx
can read to use unreadable volumes,click initialize to continue with the disk inserted ,click continue"
~
( I really need access to these files- and do not want to re-initialize the HD!!)
I ran Disk Utility /first aid "verify & repair , the following info came up:
Repairing disk "main backup 2007 ".
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Invalid key length ( <<<IN RED )
Repair completed. "
~~
Though it said the repair was completed, the "invalid key length" issue
still comes up when re-running disk utility...Hard drive would still not
mount on desktop-even after restarting .
~~~~~
If there is a mac genius out there that can help?- it would be greatly
appreciated. I have tried to call seagate several times in the last several hours-
1st time-they disconnected me after being on hold 10 minutes-2nd call
I was put on hold for 40 minutes ..Finally spoke to someone ( they are not mac users or mac experts!)and he said I would need to send it to Seagate's Data Recovery-... for a fee of course!
~~~
At this point, I am hoping to just get the files and photos off
the hard drive- I heard about Disk Warrior-should I use that and if so
what version?
Thank you very much!
L

Will zapping the PRAM be of any use in getting the external to mount on the desktop?
Your external Hard drive is already recognized. But it cannot be mounted on the desktop due to its directory damage. You can certainly Zap the PRAM, and it will not hurt anything, but I am skeptical that it will change the situation.
Do you think the Disk Warrior 4.0 cd will even work on my G3 350MHZ running Mac OS 10.1.5?
If you boot from the CD and run it from the CD, absolutely yes. If you attempt to INSTALL it from a download or a CD, probably not.
Have you ever used Disc Warrior and is using it complicated?
I own and use Disk Warrior. You select the drive to be rebuilt, it builds a proposed new directory from the information and file fragments available.
When complete, it will provide a list of problems encountered, tell you what files have been placed in the "Rescued Items" folder, and allow you too look at your drive using the proposed new directory. Your only decision is whether the new directory seems to be an improvement over the old \[in your case, hopelessly corrupted] directory. You then tell it whether to replace the old directory with the proposed new directory, or to abandon its work and leave your Hard Drive unchanged.
Is there a good chance that the ext HD will still have my files on it- or do you think from what I've described that they are gone ?
From what you have described, your files are very likely to still be there. Sometimes in a situation like this, a handful of files cannot be recovered.
My other thought was to take the external HD there and have them try to recover the files.
Make sure you completely understand the costs involved. File recovery using a service like DriveSavers can run into many hundreds of dollars. They are prepared to disassemble your drive in a clean room and replace controller boards and read/write heads to achieve success. Your drive has serious, but not fatal, Directory damage. The Hardware, and most of your files, are likely just fine.

Hard Drive Won't Mount After Repair by Second Computer

I have an G4 Cube with OS 10.2 on the internal hard drive (which is full) and OS 10.4 on an external La CIe hard drive (that I use as my main OS). The external hard drive accumulated serious damage that couldn't be repaired by Disk Utility on the internal drive. My copy of DiskWarrior X would not run under OS 10.2 (10.4 was required) and it wouldn't boot from the CD either So I connected the external hard drive to my second computer, an iMAC running OS 10.5. (Unfortunately, I disconnected the external hard drive when the computer was off instead of ejecting the drive by dragging it to the Wastebasket.) The external drive mounted and DiskWarrior easily constructed a new directory, defragmented the files, and eliminated all of the damage on the external hard drive visible to Disk Utility. However, when I reconnected the repaired external hard drive to the G4 Cube, the drive wouldn't mount. Privileges were repaired on both computers with the external drive connected without helping. Being repaired while connected to a higher OS or perhaps simply being connected to a higher OS seems to have left the LaCie external hard drive in a state which couldn't be mounted by an earlier OS.
Following this hypothesis, it booted the G4 Cube from the OS 10.4 Installation CD while the LaCie external hard drive was connected. When I cancelled installation of OS 10.4, I was asked to choose a start-up disk AND OS 10.4 WAS NOW MAGICALLY AVAILABLE ON THE EXTERNAL DRIVE. Simply starting up from a more advanced OS allowed the hard drive to mount.
Shockingly, when I restarted from OS 10.2, the external hard drive was still mounted. Whatever was preventing the drive from mounting was a TRANSIENT STATE, not backwards incompatability.
POSSIBLE LESSON: If a hard drive won't mount on computer A after being connected to computer B, consider booting computer A using the OS on the installation disk from computer B.

If you need to repair a hard drive with OS X installed on it, you must use that same version of OS X to perform the repair. Using another--in this case, newer--OS can cause quite a bit of trouble, as the directories/permissions may be dealt with differently between the OS's.
Seems you've learned this lesson--and luckily you didn't lose anything!
~Lyssa

Firewire hard drive won't mount - Filesystem verify or repair failed.

Hi all - over the last day my lacie hard drive won't mount - i have tried it on various computers with the same result
disk utility can see it but won't mount or repair it reporting the following error
Filesystem verify or repair failed.
any help would be appreciated
best
darren/uk

Try Disk Utility first. It's in your Applications/Utilities folder.
You'll want to select the disk in question, then +Repair Disk+ (not Permissions). This actually repairs the +File System+ that's on the disk.
If that works, you're ok, unless it begins happening frequently. Then you need to save up for a new one.
If DU can't fix it, then one of the others might. Disk Warrior is about $100, and many people here say it's the best. There are others for less money, but there's no guarantee that any of them will succeed.
You can also try just erasing it, and choose +Security Options,+ then +Zero Out Data.+ If that fails, or you have more problems with the drive, you need a new one.

Lacie Hard Drives won't mount

My two Lacie hard drives won't mount on my G5 running Tiger. They were fine on my G4 iMac running Panther. I've tried using the Lacie Update Tool but the drives aren't recognised. I've tested the firewire cables on another drive that works and they're fine, so it's not cables.
Both drives power up okay and whir into action, but just aren't talking to the G5.
Lacie d2 HD 80GB FW DV
Lacie 40GB (no model number, "DESIGN BY F.A.PORSCHE", no model number).
Any ideas much appreciated.

Reply
This happened to me with a LaCie external drive as well.
The problem is that LaCie formats the drives as PC-based
and not Mac Extended, so unless you reformatted the
drives to Mac when you started using them, your access
to them on any Mac may result in a failure to mount.
Once that happens retrieval of data is made more difficult
because of this formatting incongruity.
There is no way you can get the data once your G4 quits
mounting them. If you can get the data off of the drives,
back it up and then reformat the drives using Mac's Disc
Utility. Then you can reload the data and I suspect all of
your Macs will then mount the drives via Firewire.
Good Luck!
My two Lacie hard drives won't mount on my G5 running
Tiger. They were fine on my G4 iMac running Panther.
I've tried using the Lacie Update Tool but the drives
aren't recognized. I've tested the firewire cables on
another drive that works and they're fine, so it's
not cables.
iBook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.4)

DVD-Ram disks won't mount on Dual 450 - help!

I've got a particular and pressing problem. I'm an audio engineer among other things. I have a lot of files archived temporarily on DVD-Ram disks from my old Dual 450. I have to retrieve some files pronto but suddenly the DVD-Ram disk won't mount. The drive spits out the disk as soon as I insert it. It will mount CDs but not these DVD-Ram disks. Please help. I need to back these up off of thse old disks. But more urgently I have pending sessions that require I get some files from these disks. This happens both under OS 9.1 and 10.2.8 the last revisions of this computer I did. But it used to work until a year or so ago.
I have so far repaired permissions, used Disk Warrior and sprayed around the dusty drive with compressed air. It seems that perhapos a mechanism is loose springing the disk out when it's not immediately recognized as a CD or DVD-R.
Help!

Probably your best bet is to dismantle the drive and try manually cleaning the lenses, which has made a difference for some users.
Other option is to replace the drive with a new one capable of reading (but not necessarily writing) DVD-RAM media. LG-4163B is one such drive, Pioneer DVR-110 can also read DVD-RAM. These drives are under $40 online in the US.

External Hard Drive won't mount - tried Disk Warrior, am backing up as a .dmg...will this work?

Hi Guys,
Hopefully someone can help! Fairly desperate situation here...
I backed up around 700GB of data to an Iomega external hard drive (supplied by the client), using my Macbook Pro...all was fine when I unmounted the drive at the end of the backup.
The client took the drive away and called me to say he mounted the drive in Windows (on a PC), and he was able to work with the files for a time, but now the drive won't mount...
I collected the drive, hooked it up to my Mac Pro, but OSX tells me it can't mount the drive. It shows up in Disk Utility in the sidebar, but not on the desktop...
I tried repairing the disk using Disk Utility and with Disk Warrior, both tell me the disk cannot be repaired...
I am currently making a backup of the drive as a .dmg file, using a program called Disk Drill...it's slow as I expected, but I'm still not sure the .dmg will mount...because surely it's just making a copy of the data exactly, of which some part is not mounting (a mount directory or something???)
Is there any way you guys can think of me somehow taking the data and backing it up onto another disk?
Specialist recovery services seem to think there shouldn't be any problem recovering the data, and of couse, as a costly last resort, that's what I'll have to do, but does anyone know how they may go about doing it? It is something vastly complicated such as a command line thing?
Sorry about the length of this question...just hope someone can help!
Thanks in advance...

You didn't say what format (filesystem type) the disk was.
However, I'd say your analysis is probably correct. Something has corrupted the disk. You can make a disk image copy to the .dmg which will preserve the data, such as it is, but I doubt extremely if it will fix any file system corruption.
Furthermore, if both Disk Utility and Disk Warrior have said the disk is unreadable I'm dubious that anything else will magically repair it and that recovery probably consists of snuffling through the disk block by block.
However if the filesystem is FAT (Windows) there may be other (Windows) utilities that can fix it.
You said you 'backed up the data'. Does that mean you still have the original data on your MBP? Are you trying to recover the client's changes?

My WD hard drive won't "mount" it shows in disk utility but can't be repaired. I'm thinking this is a software issue since the disk is being recognized.

I
I have a WD drive that won't "mount". Tried repairing, turning off and back on, unplugging and nothing has worked. Can anyone help?

The WD Passport has no independent power supply, relying instead on getting power from a USB port on the computer. AS the drive ages it can need more power to spin the platter and many USB ports on notebook cannot provid that much.
Anther issue is the WD drive itself. WD uses an odd proproprietary formatting scheme that makes the drive not always behave like typical Mac drives.
If the drive contains nothing you need to access, use Disk Utility to reformat it to "Macintosh Extended (Journalled)"
If the drive contains important data, there are a couple of inexpensive ways to get more power to it:
1) Get a "Y" conenctor cable like this:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/USB2AYMBPB/
It draws power from two USB ports and ofter that is enough to make the drive work.
2) Get a powered USB Hub:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/NewerTech/USB2HB7PRO/
It has its own power brick and that is usually enough to get an older USB external drive recognized.

Urgent - I think I just lost everything on my MacBook Pro. Hard drive won't mount and booting up shows "no" symbol

My MacBook Pro (13" mid 2010, Yosemite) doesn't feel like booting up. It gives me the no symbol after the progress bar is about 1/4 of the way through.
Additionally, it won't mount in the Recovery HD. It shows up as disk0s6 and clicking Mount does nothing. Can't seem to mount it in the Terminal either.
The disk partition is encrypted, so unfortunately I can't pull the hard drive out of my MBP and pull the stuff off it with my PC.
I tried First Aid - "no problems found" (such LIES!)
I tried PRAM - didn't work
I tried Verbose Mode - went fine for the first minute, then hung for a while before returning to the "No" screen and in the bottom right corner "Still waiting for root drive".
I tried SMC - didn't work
Most recently I did install rEFInd - which is a boot manager. I was afraid it screwed up the EFI partition -seemingly not, as it will boot to Recovery and external drives.
The data still seems to be there, but the OS is having trouble accessing it.
Do you know what would be causing this? I really need that data back :/

It appears I can unlock the partition, using diskutil via the Terminal (diskutil coreStorage unlockVolume <UUID> -passphrase <passphrase>).
However the volume doesn't have a UUID. It lists the partition type as "FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF" (which is a UUID) but using that doesn't work.
Additionally when I use diskutil coreStorage list, it comes up with nothing. I'm at a loss here, the partition doesn't even know it's own UUID or that it's encrypted. It seems quite damaged to me but I don't have the slightest idea why, as I CAN boot to it and enter the password but it will stop at the "no" symbol part of the way along.

10.8.5 external hard drive won't mount

After installing 10.8.5 update my Seagate external hard drive that I use as my Time Machine backup won't mount. I can see it in Disk Utility, but it refuses to mount.
Anyone else? Suggestions?

Please read this whole message before doing anything.
This procedure is a diagnostic test. It’s unlikely to solve your problem. Don’t be disappointed when you find that nothing has changed after you complete it.
The purpose of the test is to determine whether the problem is caused by third-party software that loads automatically at startup or login, by a peripheral device, or by corruption of certain system caches.
Disconnect all wired peripherals except those needed for the test, and remove all aftermarket expansion cards. Boot in safe mode and log in to the account with the problem. Note: If FileVault is enabled on some models, or if a firmware password is set, or if the boot volume is a software RAID, you can’t do this. Ask for further instructions.
Safe mode is much slower to boot and run than normal, and some things won’t work at all, including sound output and Wi-Fi on certain iMacs. The next normal boot may also be somewhat slow.
The login screen appears even if you usually log in automatically. You must know your login password in order to log in. If you’ve forgotten the password, you will need to reset it before you begin. Test while in safe mode. Same problem? After testing, reboot as usual (i.e., not in safe mode) and verify that you still have the problem. Post the results of the test.

External Hard Drive Won't Mount in 10.2.8

Greetings,
I have a MacBook Pro running the latest version of Tiger. I have a Maxtor 300 GB external hard drive (Mac OS Extended [journaled] ) which I use with my MacBook to store music, video, other media, and backups. I connect that drive to my MacBook via FireWire, normally, but the drive can also do USB.
Since wireless connectivity is so nice, I thought it would be nice to be able to access that hard drive from anywhere in my apartment, without being tethered to the drive by a FireWire cable.
Enter my wife's iBook G3 and Mac OS 10.2.8.
She has this computer from her school where she teaches. It has a G3 processor running at 600 mhz with 128 mb of ram. Since she rarely uses the old machine, I wanted to use it to "serve" my external hard drive to my MacBook.
But when I connect the hard drive to the iBook via either USB or FireWire, it does not mount. I ran Disk Utility and the drive is visible in the pane on the left of the interface, but when I verify the disk I get lots of error messages that say, "Reserved fields in the catalog record have incorrect data."
I don't want to let the iBook repair the disk because I am afraid it my screw the whole thing up and I would lose all my data...not a good proposition.
So, my question: What is going on here? Is this drive simply not going to work with 10.2.8?
I wish I could upgrade the machine to Tiger, but it does not have the minimum system requirements!
Thank you very much for your help. I apologize if I missed something else in the forums that addressed this same issue.
Macbook Pro 2.0 Ghz Intel Core Duo 1 GB Ram 15.4" LCD Mac OS X (10.4.7)

All you need to upgrade the iBook for Tiger is another 128 MBs of RAM. It has both Firewire and USB ports. You do want to upgrade it for what you plan to do. The problem you may continue to have, however, may be due to the fact that the age of the computer is such the disk controller does not support hard drive volumes larger than 128 GBs, which is probably the reason the drive won't mount.
The reason you get DU errors is likely because the drive was formatted using the Intel Tiger version of DU, while you were using the Jaguar version. That's a definite no-no.

Hard Disk Won't Mount Volume

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