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

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Welcome to Apple Discussions!
Usually this is indicative of a damaged directory. However, sometimes it is indicative of a dying hard drive,
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http://www.macmaps.com/directoryfaq.html
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http://www.macmaps.com/backup.html

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Hello Everyone,
I am hoping that one of you fine mac experts may be able to assist ~
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~
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Will zapping the PRAM be of any use in getting the external to mount on the desktop?
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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.
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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.
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Lacie d2 HD 80GB FW DV
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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.
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Utility. Then you can reload the data and I suspect all of
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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
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iBook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.4)

External drives won't mount after running repair permissions

None of my external drives will mount after running disk permissions. Drives work fine on my mbpro.
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Repairing Permission only deals with installer receipts and system components. Not with mounting or accessing hard drives.
Have your run Apple DU First Aid? Disk Warrior? Only use latest version for your OS.
Are you trying to clone your system to external and then repairing permissions? trying to boot from them?
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What type of cases and interface are these?

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Hard Drive Won't Mount After Repair by Second Computer

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