Hard Drive has disappeared

I came home today and booted up my six day old iMac and the grey screen appeared and then a folder with a question mark appeared blinking. I got on my old macbook (which I'm using right now) and looked up so scenarios as to what to do. I was told to resest the PRAM. I did this. Nothing changed. I instered my OSX Installation Disk and went to Disk Utility to repaird it but it didn't show up, only the CD/DVD drive appeared in Disk Utility. I tried to restore using a backup (it was last fully backed up this morning at 10am) but when it asked me on which hard drive I wanted to install the backup it only gave me the option of my WD External Hard Drive. When I tried to just reinstall windows period, after unplugging the external hard drive, it asked me the same question but this time didn't offer me any hard drive? Is my Hard Drive Fried? It's only 6 days old?! I haven't done anything to fry the hard drive or anything. After being with mac for 6+ years this is the first time I've ever had hardware/software issues. Anyone else experience this? I don't have a car and it really isn't that easy for me to get to a Mac Store. What should I do?

It seems like the HD has failed. Call AppleCare immediately the number is in your owners manual. If you purchased your machine directly from Apple you can request a return and exchange. If you bought it from a dealer you would need to work within the dealer's return policies.
Roger

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My external hard drive has disappeared

My external hard drive has disappeared from the 'open file' window in photoshop CS6. It's working fine and appears in other applications such as bridge and lightroom. How do I get it back? I'm running a Mac on OS X.

You may have accidentally dragged the drive out of the Devices list in the sidebar.
In a Finder window with visible sidebar, do Shift+Cmd+G to get the Go To Folder dialog. Enter
/volumes
then click OK.
You'll see all your mounted volumes in the Finder window. Drag the required one to the Devices list in the sidebar.

Help! Internal hard drive has disappeared

I just realized that one of my four internal hard drives is gone. I opened the machine and switched the bays and all was good except that drive did not show up and when I go to Apple System Profiler it shows that that bay is empty, nothing mounts. Can anyone Please Please help me give me some direction on what to do? I am literally freaking out and I try to be pretty calm and think things out. I have already reset the PRAM, done the SMU and have moved the drives to different bays which leads me to believe it is a hard drive failure. What can I do to or what software will help me mount this drive and find it. Dyin here. Sorry for the drama.

You have not changed anything about that hard drive in its Spotlight Comments, have you?
That can make it disappear from the Finder. However, you should be able to see it using Disk Utility.
You might also check to see if some of the contacts / pins in the rear of the drive have been bent or broken. If it does not show up in any slot / bay, that could be the problem.
If you have heard repetitive metallic clicks and / or scrapes, then the drive has probably crashed.

My Hard Drive has disappeared!

I wonder if anyone can help me with a problem I'm having please. The icon for my main hard drive (start up disk) has gone from my desktop and is no longer displayed in finder. This also coincides with a noticeable drop in performance shown particularly when running Logic pro 7.2 which seems to struggle when only doing relatively modest processing.
I thought it was a problem with the hard drive and after doing a repair and then full wipe and OS install (which made no difference) I then bought a brand new hard drive and installed OS 10.4 and then all the updates. This fixed the problem for about a week but then the same happened - the icon disappeared from desktop and finder.
I have reset the PMU and have tried to reset the PRAM but this seems not to work and the machine ends up booting up in safe mode.
Any ideas anyone?
G5 dual 1.8 processors Mac OS X (10.4.9) 4 GIG RAM

What disk drive were you using? what did you buy?
Not all drives work as well or compatible (most do though).
I'd be buying 500GB drives.
Where is your backup? Do you use SuperDuper, CloneX or something that makes bootable backups?
When you repaired your drive, was that from disk drive; from DVD; other?
Do you have Disk Warrior 4 to use?
Sometimes bad memory causes disk drive problems and corruption.
After resetting pram/nvram/pmu you have to reset the startup disk. That will not cause it to boot in Safe Mode.
Do you use Applejack to repair your boot drive? tried using /sbin/fsck -fy in Single User Mode command?
If I get a new drive or think a drive is having trouble, first thing I do is zero the drive.
Was your boot drive half full? 3/4?
Try keeping the boot drive under 50% and keep data on another drive, and 3-4th for scratch and editing to help performance.
Apple Hardware Test CD
Hardware Monitor
- two other items to use.

External Hard drive has disappeared from fcpx

Hey guys,
I know this question comes up a lot so I'm suprised to say I've failed to find any fixes on other threads. Many people having the same issue say that the drive shows up temporarily in the events and project source windows but then disapear, this is not the case for me it just doesn't show up at all. I've put 90% of my fcp projects and events onto one external hard drive which is working fine with everything but fcp, it even recognises it if i want to import from the drive. It has been working fine up until now which is weird as I've not changed anything on it recently, the only thing I've changed is I used a client's drive to do the latest edit, which worked fine!
Someone must have found a solution to this problem by now, it's causing me a lot of trouble as I've got deadlines to meet and I'm being put out by what seems to be a ridiculous little bug, surely apple would have got onto a fix for this by now?? In the mean time all and any suggestions welcome!

llyrhughes wrote:
Hey guys,
I know this question comes up a lot so I'm suprised to say I've failed to find any fixes on other threads. Many people having the same issue say that the drive shows up temporarily in the events and project source windows but then disapear, this is not the case for me it just doesn't show up at all. I've put 90% of my fcp projects and events onto one external hard drive which is working fine with everything but fcp, it even recognises it if i want to import from the drive. It has been working fine up until now which is weird as I've not changed anything on it recently, the only thing I've changed is I used a client's drive to do the latest edit, which worked fine!
Someone must have found a solution to this problem by now, it's causing me a lot of trouble as I've got deadlines to meet and I'm being put out by what seems to be a ridiculous little bug, surely apple would have got onto a fix for this by now?? In the mean time all and any suggestions welcome!
Have you used it successfully with FCP X before? What content has changed in the drive?
I am assuming you checked all the usual things, but still it is worth taking a look again:
1) Is it formatted as Mac OS extended?
2) Did you add any folder titled something that may be thought of as a camera (folders like "AVCHD", "Private", "DCIM", "Video", ....)
3) Are the folders called exactly "Final Cut Events" and "Final Cut Projects" and located at the ROOT of the drive?
It seems like you know all this, but still there may have been something you missed.

External Hard Drive has "Disappeared"

I have a Maxtor One Touch II External drive conected through a Firewire 800 cable which I use for Time Machine. The drive got switched off a couple of weeks ago, but when I switched it back on it would not mount. The drive sounds like it is running normally.
Having searched the boards, I've tried the following:
OS X Software update (I'm on 10.6.8)
SMC reset
PRAM reset
Disk permissions repair
Disk repair (from install disk)
Creating a new user account
Connecting the drive via USB
Onyx and Cocktail scripts
When I run Profiler the drive shows up under Firewire Bus as "unknown device", the details are:
GUID 0x0
Maximum speed: up to 400 Mb/sec
Connection speed: unknown
When I enter "diskutil list" in Terminal I get the following:
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            499.8 GB   disk0s2
Any more suggestions? Or is my drive ready for the recycling bin?
Thanks, Noel

Thought you could use this info about getting FireWire to work! (I'm assuming the One Touch is FireWire; some of this works for USB too)
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. Yours is the 10.3.9 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

My iMac G5's Hard Drive Has Most Likely Failed

So my hard drive has been having problems since November 2005, but the computer has been barely holding out, until now. The computers just dead. I got this message from
It happened at the most random time. Yesterday morning, I turned on my computer and opened Safari. Everything went just fine, and about 3/4 way through loading the apple startpage, the entire computer froze up.
I tried disk utility but it froze while verifying and repairing disk permissions (about 1/8 started and it froze) and when I did verify disk, it came up with a popup window stating:
Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit
And then in the Disk Utility information window where it says the status that its at (Checking....) it said this:
Checking HFS Plus Volume
Checking Extents Overflow File
Checking Catalog File
Invalid Sibling Link
Volume Check Failed
The underlying task reported failure on exit.
1 HFS volume checked
1 volume could not be repaired because of an error
Then I ran fsck in single-user mode, and i got this:
#fsck -fy
disk0s3: I/O timeout
(4, 7808)
I'm not sure what the coordinates mean. I'm thinking they might be the coordinates to a bad sector that may be screwing EVERYTHING up because the computer failed to recognize the bad sector, and close it off of any further use.
After that I ran diskutility in single-user mode thinking maybe the GUI version was corrupted... but I let the diskutil verifyPermissions /dev/disk0s3 run for an hour and nothing showed up on the screen so i just decided to stop, shut down, and go to bed.
So now i've figured, my iMac has given me enough trouble as it is. ive had so many problems with it... ever since november 2005 (5 months into owning it) it has had the following hard drive error code show up in extended test for the Apple Hardware Test ever since... and about 1 hour ago, i retested it, and sure enough this came up:
**ERROR*CODE***ERROR*CODE**
2STF/8/3: S-ATA Bus O-Master
**ERROR*CODE***ERROR*CODE**
I'm really not happy with mac right now. I think their 1 year warranty is useless and they pretty much leave you screwed if you dont buy their applecare protection plan.
I have a windows 98 (upgraded from 95) that i bought way back in 1997, and its still functional... with the same hard drive... same everything... and it works just fine... except for the memory is small because back then 128 GB was the biggest it got) :P
so a 5 GB hard drive going on its 10th working years, and this 150 GB hard drive failed after 14 months... all i've gotta say is: Apple, thats pretty pathetic... especially after you mock PC in their commercials for "breaking down". Ive actually had less problems with all of my 3 PCs combined then I've had with this **** iMac.
So now heres what i'm trying to figure out. i'm wondering, what kind of hard drive i shuold buy to replace it... i tried the DIY hardware replacement ordering page but it says that the apple website couldnt find it (http://www.apple.com/support/imac/g5/diy/).
I wasnt planning on buying from the apple DIY anyway, but I wanted to see if it would specify a type of hard drive. Where is the popular website to go to buy these things, and how expensive will it be for me to replace it with a hard drive about as big as my current one).
Or should I not throw my hard drive away yet, and invest hope in it somehow. I heard DiskWarrior could do the trick, but I dont want to have to spend $80 on a piece of software that might not even work out right. And all the free ones you have to download to your mac... but too bad for me, my mac wont even start up... (well it does but when it gets to the desktop, its pretty much unfunctional... just a moving mouse that wont do anything).
Is there some renouned website (as crucial.com is for memory) among these forums that you might suggest?
I'm open and desperate for any input i can get. The sooner the better
Thanks in advance
-Mark

Hey look, its my friend Charlie from my Disk Permissions Error -36 post.
Here's our thread from last time. Alot of the stuff there still pertains: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=620422&tstart=0
It turns out the reformat I did only worked for a little while. Then last friday, my kernel was corrupted, and so i did "Erase All" but skipped the "Zero All Data" figuring that it wouldnt be necessary since I wasnt discarding my drive, so there wasnt anything to secure from anyone recovering private data. It worked for 4 days after that, and now I'm here again. With problems.
Do you remember getting disk I/O errors on disk0s3?
If you remember way back then, I had gotten this error when I did diskutil list in Terminal:
Aug 30 21:42:08 mark-imac-g5 kernel[0]: disk0s3: I/O error.
/dev/disk0
#: type name size identifier
0: Applepartitionscheme *149.1 GB disk0
1: Applepartitionmap 31.5 KB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 148.9 GB disk0s3
I'm running DiskWarrior right now (borrowed it from a friend... didnt feel up to paying the $80 & have it potentially not work) and its stuck at this message:
Rebuilding Directory Data
[ |||||||||||Solid Progress Bar||||||||||| ]
Step 5: Locating Directory Data
[\\\\\\\Barbershop-like Progress Bar\\\\\\\]
Speed inhibited by disk malfunction (Skip) (Cancel)
Its been stuck there for about an hour, and I'm assuming its not going to work as you suggested it wouldn't
It's too late to do any good now, but if you ever run the
hardware test and get an error code, you should have Apple
look at it. If you were getting that error code 5 months
after the computer was new, a replacement drive would have
been covered under your warranty.
I wish I had actually done so. I was a mac-noob back then so I had no idea what anything was, and I was still getting used to the actual working-with-a-mac thing (ive been a Windows user for most of my life except for working/helping teachers with their macs at school... i was always the computer-person in school... it was pretty awesome :P)
I have to disagree with the other posters. I don't think >DiskWarrior is going to help you. Data Rescue II might help >you to get some files off your hard drive if you have files >on there that aren't backed up. But my experience was that >when I got the error in the hardware test, DiskWarrior >didn't work.
Right now I have everything backed up that I need, so it's not like i'm using DiskWarrior to get my data back. I just want a program to be able to tell the hard drive that these certain sectors that are acting up and causing the hard drive to fail are ruined and to not use them anymore. If its not just 1 sector, but the entire hard drive that is failed, I'm not even gonna bother salvaging it (even though i'm sure if it was completely failed there would be no way of getting it back that deep into failure).
I read at this website about someone else who had a similar problem to mine (http://www.desktoppublishingforum.com/bb/archive/index.php/t-901.htmldiskwarrior+speed+inhibited+by+diskmalfunction&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=2):
ElyseC - 07-14-2005, 11:52 PM
And now the latest reply from Marc the support tech:
There have been a handful who have seen success after four
or five days with the "speed inhibited by disk
malfunction" message. There have also been a few
up to a week. From there, admittedly, the state
of the drive has to be pretty damaged for DiskWarrior to
run so long, although the speed DiskWarrior can work is
also related to the speed of the processor, so four days
for a G3 is different than four days for a G5.
She later posted this:
,..for a variety of reasons I ended up letting DW chug away on my drive for a few days shy of an entire month.
*UPDATE MID WRITING THE POST*
Disk warrior finally unfroze! It's now Comparing Directories (recording any file or folder differences).
I'll post more when it's all done
Or if i have trouble mid-way

My computers hard drive has stoped working, how can I retrieve my Itunes library from my computer?

My computers hard drive has stoped working. How can I retrieve my itunes library? My back ups were on this hard drive as well.
When I brought my computer to be fixed they said they would retrieve photos and music and documents but loose my programs. That being said I am not sure if I will recover my music from itunes because it may fall under the program category. I support itunes by purchasing from itunes, but now i am in a position where i may loose years of purchassing music and it has me feeling a little bit sick to be honest...the stress this is causing is really big. DÙoes anyone have any experience with this type of problem?
Help is appreciated, thank you.

If the data is recoverable from the drive then they should have recovered the entire iTunes folder which includes the library database. Restore this into the <User's Music> folder of a replacement system, install iTunes, and it should be as before.
See also Recover your iTunes library from your iPod or iOS device. Even if you don't have one there should be some useful links...
tt2

My hard drive has 70.93 GB available, yet when i have more than one internet tab open, i have to force quit google chrome because 'there is no more available application memory'. How can I solve this? I have a 2009 macbook pro running on 10.6.8.

My hard drive has 70.93 GB available, yet when i have more than one internet tab open, i have to force quit google chrome because 'there is no more available application memory'. How can I solve this? I have a 2009 macbook pro running on 10.6.8. I have tried updating to mavericks through the mac app store but after it downloading for a day i got an error message saying there was a problem with the download. The same thing happens if i try to update itunes or the mac app store. After research, i have also tried repairing disk permissions, but every time they do get repaired the 'repair' button still appears, i'm not sure if it's because it was unable to repair the initial problems or if it just keeps detecting new ones.

2 GBs is a minimum in which you can do many things, but not concurrently. Be very careful to not install third-party add-ons, limit the number of applications you choose to enter in Login Items, run as few applications concurrently as you demand.
I would consider adding more RAM to your computer. Your model supports 8 GBs, so I would install that.

One of the folders on my external hard drive has transformed into a unix executable file and I can no longer access my files. Is there any way to save the data?

One of the folders on my external hard drive has transformed into a unix executable file and I can no longer access my files. Is there any way to save the data?

Wow, have seen Files do that, but a whole Folder as I recall!
Could be many things, we should start with this...
"Try Disk Utility
1. Insert the Mac OS X Install disc, then restart the computer while holding the C key.
2. When your computer finishes starting up from the disc, choose Disk Utility from the Installer menu. (In Mac OS X 10.4 or later, you must select your language first.)
Important: Do not click Continue in the first screen of the Installer. If you do, you must restart from the disc again to access Disk Utility.
3. Click the First Aid tab.
4. Select your Mac OS X volume.
5. Click Repair. Disk Utility checks and repairs the disk."
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214
Then try a Safe Boot, (holding Shift key down at bootup), run Disk Utility in Applications>Utilities, then highlight your drive, click on Repair Permissions, reboot when it completes.
(Safe boot may stay on the gray radian for a long time, let it go, it's trying to repair the Hard Drive.)

My external drive has disappeared although i shows up in disc utility, and flash drives also do not appear. Any ideas? Have tried restarting but.....

My back-up has stopped as my external drive is shown as "not accessible" and has disappeared from Finder although it shows up in Disc Utility. Similarly my USB flash drive has disappeared. Restarting does not help! Any ideas?

That's good news but maybe run a Repair Disk on it anyway given that it has been somewhat unpredictable.
With Time Machine, one expert helper here named pondini has an extensive knowledge of that software and has prepared a lot of material on it. Here is a link to some of it.
http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html
http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html

External hard drive has crashed how do i recover my purchases previous library ?

external hard drive has crashed how do i recover my purchases previous library ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc4S2l9neKM

After trying to change permissions on my computer so others on my network can access files, my external Hard Drive has a lock on it and I can't access files. I've tried repairing permissions, logging in under another Administrator account, using Terminal

After trying to change permissions on my computer so others on my network can grab files, my external Hard Drive has a lock on it and I can't access files. I've tried repairing permissions, logging in under another Administrator account, using Terminal to fix the problem, downloaded BatChmod but nothing works… Any other suggestions? I have an Imac running OS10.6.8.

There is suddenly a lock icon on my external backup drive!
Custom Permissions

Hard Drives Keeps Disappearing Windows 8.1

I just recently upgraded to Win 8.1. I have 3 hdds. Win is installed on Samsung SSD. The other hdds is for software and for games. The gaming hard drive keeps disappearing. I have to restart the computer to get it show again in My Computers. Also I notice
sometimes when I restart my boot order keeps changing. I have to go into the bios and change the load order back to my SSD to the 1st priority. Can someone help with this issue?

Hi wjason777,
OS related issue please consult on MS Answers http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows
Hardware related issue please contact your provider.
For your issue, when you reboot you can press F2 or F12 to load your boot menu. However, please notice the key depends on your hardware. It migth also be F5. So you may have to contact your computer provider about this issue.
If you can open that Boot menu. Please try search for boot order. Then you will be able to change the order.
By the way, if SSD keeps disappear, I think it is poor contact. I will recommend you contact your provider for more details.
Regards,
Barry Wang
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Hi,I have recently replaced by hard drive with a ssd. My old hard drive has all my iTunes stuff.i would like to install only iTunes programme on the ssd with all the content on the old hard drive. How do I do it?

Hi,I have recently replaced by hard drive with a ssd. My old hard drive has all my iTunes stuff.i would like to install only iTunes programme on the ssd with all the content on the old hard drive. How do I do it?

Install iTunes.
Once install, hold SHIFT and launch iTunes.
When prompted, point iTunes to the correct location for the iTunesLibrary.itl file which should be in the iTunes folder under <user>/Music on the old drive.

Hard Drive has disappeared

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