Internal Hard Drive Won't Load

Specs:
iMac Mid 2007 OSC 10.9.4
Processor: 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Memory: 4 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
500 GB Hard Drive
So, my hard drive began acting funky about a year ago (would freeze at startup or freeze when trying to click on the Desktop). I restarted my iMac and loaded the installation DVD, using a USB-Hard Drive as my Startup Disk (I know, I know...). Ever since this issue I've just booted from this hard drive and made do with the reduction in speed from using a USB-connected hard drive, as there weren't any significant problems from going about this way.
Lately, though, applications have become significantly slower, to the point where loading more than one tab on Safari or switching from App to App causes the rainbow wheel to spin for a few seconds, forcing me to finally turn to you guys to see if you all could provide any advice.
I tried all the Safe Boot options/resetting the PRAM (at least, I think I've tried them all) and none seem to produce any worthwhile results. Even inserting the Install Disk didn't seem to help. I'm able to view my internal hard drive, launch applications from it, and so forth, but something seems to be corrupted/wrong with it being my Startup Disk.
I've tried Disk Utility to see the problem, and this is what comes up:
When Repairing Disk Permissions: nothing comes up...'Permissions repair complete'.
When Repairing Disk: "Error: Live file system is not supported".
My initial question (which will probably be revised once someone redirects me to what my main issue is) would be: Would I be able to completely erase my internal hard drive, repartition it, then clone my USB drive to this? Would that work the way I'd think it would? Or is the problem deeper than that?
Thank you.

The smart status is just the first thing to check, if you think there could be an issue with a drive. What I would do, if it was my computer. I would make sure all data I wanted was off the internal drive. I would then format the internal drive, and create a new partition. Then put a clean system on the internal drive. Use migration assistant to move the users, data and applications form the USB drive you have been using.
If I got errors, crashing or very slow functionality from the internal drive, I would look at replacing the drive.

Similar Messages

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 drives won't appear in Disk Util

I have a bizarre problem with my hard drives now. I'm on a 2.4GHz Core2Duo Macbook Pro 15" with 10.5.4. I've switched the hard drive a couple of times before with no issues whatsoever. Now, with the exception of the brand new one that won't hold an install, my internal hard drives don't show up in the install disk's Disk Utility.
I got a new hard drive to try the other day, installed it, booted to my OSX install disk to use Disk Utility. I switched the new disk to GUID and formatted it as journaled like usual. It took 4 hours to do the install, then after the restart it tanked. It booted back to the install disk where I checked it out. It could not repair the file system, and the drive was not "mounted". I mounted it, repartitioned and formatted it, and installed again. This time it stopped halfway through the installation and said the drive might be corrupt.
I unplugged the cable and battery, held the power button for over 5 secs, then just let it sit for about 10minutes with no power source while I thought about this. I put the original drive back in, booted into OSX, and put the new hard drive in an external USB enclosure. I formatted it while in OSX, then rebooted into the install disk and installed OSX on it while it was in the USB case. It took the installation more quickly (about an hour and a half...still not 20min like my old 7200rpm Hitachi 200g), then I booted into its OSX while in the USB drive. It booted ok, so I downloaded the updates and clicked to install them. It then went into a revolving restart. Eventually I decided it was not doing this because it was happy so I shut it off.
I swapped the hard drive out with another new one, and this one would not complete an installation while inside the computer either. It acted similarly while in the USB case. HOWEVER it would always show up as unmounted after a restart and would not recognize the drive inside the computer as a bootable disk.
I put my original drive in there to give up, and it gave me the ? folder. I booted to the install disk and it did not show up in the disk utility. I put my old hard drive in the USB case, booted to the install disk, and it showed that it was there, but unmounted and it could not repair the file system.
I repartitioned my hard drive (i have time machine working..not a huge setback) in the USB case and put it back in the computer. It still would not show up in disk utility. I put it back in the USB case, installed OSX onto it (in about 20min), restarted a couple times, saw that it was working, put it into my computer, and got the ? folder again.
I went out and bought a stardard 160GB SATA 5400rpm Seagate drive to try in there, and this fresh drive is not recognized inside the computer either when I boot into disk utility.
The brand new hard drive WILL show up in Disk Utility when I boot to it from the install disk, but it will not survive a complete installation.
So now I'm running OSX from my original hard drive in a USB case until I can figure out why the old disk recognized inside my laptop is the new hard drive upgrade, but it cannot complete an installation on it.
I'm originally a Windows slave, so I can only think in terms of AHCI or SATA-card drivers, or screwed up bios. But this is all pre-os-boot, and the apple firmware seems to be pretty automatic in picking the right settings to see stuff.

I kind of feel like drawing a flowchart to show all that I've tried. Its difficult to keep everything intelligible while listing the entire last week's efforts at 2:45am. :-/
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=41951
I also explained it here, perhaps a bit differently. Maybe some reply there might spark someone's memory of a possible problem. I understand the nature of computers (been 100% geek for 20 years), but I'm hoping there's someone out there with the specific Apple expertise to help me out. Eventually the processes I've taken and my specific situation will become clearer as the questions widdle away at this.
My original 7200rpm SATA drive that works fine won't show up when connected to the SATA cable. I've repartitioned it with HFS, and repartitioned it as free space in the USB enclosure. It simply won't show up in Disk Util. Same with the brand new test SATA drive.
The new SSD SATAII does show up, but after a 4hr install the partition is unmounted and won't show up as a boot option. I can boot to the install disk and repartition it, reinstall, or remount it. But it will never be mounted to be booted from while connected to the computer. I've had 2 of the SSD's to try, one survived one restart, then went into a never-ending restart cycle after I installed the updates. The 2nd has never successfully been mounted after the install to boot from. Now nothing can be mounted to boot from within the computer. I have to boot off of any of these drives from the USB enclosure.
If I install OSX on them while in the USB enclosure, that works, but they will not mount when connected to the SATA cable inside the lappy. The platter style SATA drives won't even be recognized...
Thanks for the instant reply, this is driving me nuts 'cuz it makes almost no sense. Thanks so much to everyone that contributes. I appreciate everything.

"Extra" Internal Hard Drives won't mount - swap, /, and /home work.

Hello All,
*** I'm updating my post finally. Sorry it's so long, I'm not entirely sure what is and isn't relevant.
*** Also I think it's a mix up with RAID causing the issue, as I'll address below, but in case I'm wrong I wanted to include the other information that came to mind before I noticed the RAID issue (because the RAID issue doesn't make a lot of sense to me).
First off, I'm running Arch64 and KDE4 with my system up to date. Also I have Gamin installed and not FAM. I use ReiserFS on all of my partitions and drives.
I have six hard drives in my computer, all of which are SATA drives. One is a WD 150GB Raptor with my swap, /, and /home partitions on it, the other five are for extra storage on what I call my media-server (they mount to /media/media-server/1 ,2 ,and so on). They only have one partition each. Of those five the first (/media/media-server/1) is a WD 1TB drive, the other four are WD 500GB drives of identical model.
All of the Raptor's patitions, swap, /, and /home mount just fine.
On top of that the 1TB drive mounts just fine. But the four 500GB drives will not mount at all. They show up in Dolphin, Disk Utility, KwikDisk, KDiskFree, and Partition Manager. However, their size is not shown and/or marked N/A, except in Partition Manager, where their size is shown. They are not seen by 'df'.
Output from 'df':
df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 10M 308K 9.7M 4% /dev
/dev/sda2 25G 7.7G 17G 32% /
none 4.0G 0 4.0G 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda3 112G 90G 22G 81% /home
/dev/sdb1 932G 919G 13G 99% /media/media-server/1
*** As for removable media, it's being a bit odd. When I first wrote this post removable media, specifically USB flash drives and SD media cards mounted fine. A while after that they'd show up in Device Notifier, but wouldn't mount. Just a little while ago they wouldn't show up in Device Notifier and wouldn't mount. Now they show up fine and mount fine again. This is possibly unrelated, I'm not sure.
Depending on what method I try to mount my hard drives I either get an 'only root can mount that' error or else a HAL drive busy or already mounted error, followed by a 'drive is not mounted' error when I use umount to double check.
*** Permissions are working better now , Dolphin isn't giving me the 'only root can mount' errors anymore. Still can't mount the drives though.
All of this output is from when the drives are listed in /etc/fstab:
Konsole output:
mount /dev/sdf1
mount: only root can mount /dev/sdf1 on /media/media-server/5
sudo mount /dev/sdf1
mount: /dev/sdf1 already mounted or /media/media-server/5 busy
umount /dev/sdf1
umount: /dev/sdf1 is not mounted (according to mtab)
sudo umount /dev/sdf1
umount: /dev/sdf1: not mounted
Dolphin output:
An error occurred while accessing 'MediaServer5', the system responded: org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume.PermissionDenied: Device /dev/sdf1 is listed in /etc/fstab. Refusing to mount.
Device Notifier output (pops up when I try to mount the drives in Dolphin):
org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume.PermissionDenied: Device /dev/sdf1 is listed in /etc/fstab. Refusing to mount.
Partition Manager:
The file system on partition /dev/sdf1 could not be mounted.
Details
==========================================================================================
Command: mount -v /dev/sdf1 /media/media-server/5
==========================================================================================
mount: /dev/sdf1 already mounted or /media/media-server/5 busy
mount: you didn't specify a filesystem type for /dev/sdf1
I will try type reiserfs
At boot, when the daemons are starting I get:
mount: /dev/sdc1 already mounted or /media/media-server/2 busy
mount: /dev/sdd1 already mounted or /media/media-server/3 busy
mount: /dev/sde1 already mounted or /media/media-server/4 busy
mount: /dev/sdf1 already mounted or /media/media-server/5 busy
This is from when the drives are not listed in /etc/fstab:
Dolphin output:
An error occurred while accessing 'MediaServer5', the system responded: org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.InterfaceLocked: The enclosing drive for the volume is locked
Device Notifier output (pops up when I try to mount the drives in Dolphin):
An error occurred while accessing 'MediaServer5', the system responded: org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.InterfaceLocked: The enclosing drive for the volume is locked
I have tried listing (with the UUID method and the /dev method) and not listing the drives in /etc/fstab, and I have 'hal' and 'dbus' daemons in /etc/rc.conf (and I've tried using only the hal daemon and not the dbus in /etc/rc.conf). I've also tried not listing 'hal', 'dbus', and 'kdm' and only booting to terminal and then mounting the drives manually, that doesn't work either.
Here is my /etc/fstab (back to using UUID's):
# /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
UUID=699cdd5e-3f4a-4b85-8dcb-5d00c00c94a9 swap swap defaults 0 0
UUID=ce94e7a3-3e07-41e5-90d7-1116e5da3121 / reiserfs defaults 0 0
UUID=a1dce435-df90-4f0d-892c-61ff3ea0c8d1 /home reiserfs defaults 0 0
## Media-Server
# media-server/1
UUID=81998a75-f887-4a35-b3fa-e159190f25a3 /media/media-server/1 reiserfs defaults 0 0
#/dev/sdb1 /media/media-server/1 reiserfs defaults 0 0
# media-server/2
UUID=8cdd114a-b190-44f6-9240-1910a5d048f7 /media/media-server/2 reiserfs defaults 0 0
#/dev/sdc1 /media/media-server/2 reiserfs defaults 0 0
# media-server/3
UUID=59164593-b56d-4c49-8837-277b3c392dfb /media/media-server/3 reiserfs defaults 0 0
#/dev/sdd1 /media/media-server/3 reiserfs defaults 0 0
# media-server/4
UUID=ba6007bd-1e36-431c-85f4-857c83845c86 /media/media-server/4 reiserfs defaults 0 0
#/dev/sde1 /media/media-server/4 reiserfs defaults 0 0
# media-server/5
UUID=6fab5364-1acb-4ba3-9f83-bb171a6d398a /media/media-server/5 reiserfs defaults 0 0
#/dev/sdf1 /media/media-server/5 reiserfs defaults 0 0
## VirtualBox USB
none /proc/bus/usb usbfs auto,busgid=108,busmode=0775,devgid=108,devmode=0664 0 0
Here's the daemons line from /etc/rc.conf:
DAEMONS=(syslog-ng !dbus hal network netfs crond wicd openntpd sshd avahi-daemon avahi-dnsconfd samba alsa mysqld lircd mythbackend !mpd !sensors !sensord !fancontrol cups keytouch kdm)
Also, /etc/mtab because only the first media-server drive is listed in it (the one that does mount):
proc /proc proc rw,relatime 0 0
sys /sys sysfs rw,relatime 0 0
udev /dev devtmpfs rw,nosuid,relatime,size=10240k,nr_inodes=1014438,mode=755 0 0
/dev/sda2 / reiserfs rw,relatime 0 0
fusectl /sys/fs/fuse/connections fusectl rw,relatime 0 0
none /dev/pts devpts rw 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs rw 0 0
/dev/sda3 /home reiserfs rw 0 0
/dev/sdb1 /media/media-server/1 reiserfs rw 0 0
none /proc/bus/usb usbfs rw,busgid=108,busmode=0775,devgid=108,devmode=0664 0 0
I attempted to add the other drives to /etc/mtab but they get overwritten upon a reboot. I've drived mounting the drives from konsole and dolphin.
All my drives used to work. At one point I had Chakra installed and had this issue after an update, however after thinking about it the problem may have actually started after the power flashed on and off here. I couldn't fix it so I installed Arch64 and KDE4 (the normal KDE from the Arch repos, not KDEMod) thinking maybe it was a Chakra specific issue. That fixed it at the time. It later happened on my Arch install. I reinstalled Arch again and the issue was gone. However the issue is back. Again I think it was after a power outage/flash but it was also after an update that included a kernel update. Best I can remember each time it's happened has been after a kernel update and power flash. So I can't say for sure which is the cause.
Oddly though if I boot from a live disc (in my case a Chakra Live DVD) I can mount and access all of the drives just fine.
Another oddity, is that in 'Disk Utility' (palimpsest) there is a 1.5TB RAID-5 array listed. The only thing I can figure is that that is what is making the individual drives busy.
Here's a screenshot from Disk Utility of the RAID-5 array:
http://theavataroftime.com/sites/defaul … enshot.png
After talking to a friend I remembered that quite a while back (over a year) we had messed around trying to setup a RAID array and dual boot WindowsXP. However, we never could get it working quite right, not even just in Linux without dual booting. I really can't say what all we did/tried, it's been too long. I realize that's not much help but...
Anyway I'm pretty certain I deleted everything RAID related at the time and turned it off. However I must be mistaken or I guess the array wouldn't be showing up.
I apologize, I really know nothing about RAID or RAID controllers. I do have an onboard RAID controller, but it's not a full fledged hardware RAID controller. It's onboard, but doesn't have it's on proccessor like good hardware RAID would. Or that's the way I understand it. Perhaps 'hybrid' is the proper term?
I checked in BIOS and my onboard RAID controller is off.
I take it that my attempts at setting up a RAID array before are still in the MBR (on that note I use GRUB and have never used LILO)? That's the only place I can think of that any leftover RAID configurations wouldn't have been wiped during reinstalling and reformatting the drives and partitions? I've reformatted my drives completely and changed the size of swap, /, and /home on several occasions since then, as well as formatting the media-server drives to ReiserFS (not sure what FS I was using when trying to setup RAID before. Perhaps FAT32 since I was trying to dual boot).
I clicked the stop array button in Disk utility, and then all the options except start array went away. Then I clicked start, and instead of my four media-server drives being listed at the side of Dolphin there was one 1.4TB drive. I rebooted and now it's back to the 4 500GB media-server drives.
I'm worried about losing a bunch of data, so I'm hesitant to start experimenting. How should I go about getting rid of the remnants of the RAID array safely?
Also here's a screenshot of MediaServer5 from Disk Utility. The other 500GB drives have the same info minus the names and labels of course:
http://theavataroftime.com/sites/defaul … enshot.png
*** I had forgotten about dmesg output. It's quite long so instead of copying it, here's a link to it:
http://theavataroftime.com/sites/defaul … /dmesg.txt
Thanks for advice on the matter.
Last edited by The Avatar of Time (2010-10-07 08:27:06)

Thanks for the reply.
Here is my output from the commands you suggested:
fuser -v -m /media/media-server/2
USER PID ACCESS COMMAND
/media/media-server/2:
root kernel mount /
theavataroftime 2518 fr.e. startkde
theavataroftime 2561 Frce. gpg-agent
theavataroftime 2575 .rce. dbus-launch
theavataroftime 2576 .rce. dbus-daemon
theavataroftime 2584 Fr.e. kdeinit4
theavataroftime 2585 Fr.e. klauncher
theavataroftime 2587 fr.e. kded4
theavataroftime 2592 .r.e. kglobalaccel
theavataroftime 2605 .r.e. kwrapper4
theavataroftime 2613 Fr.e. ksmserver
theavataroftime 2622 .r.e. kwin
theavataroftime 2656 fr.e. knotify4
theavataroftime 2658 fr.e. plasma-desktop
theavataroftime 2662 .rce. kuiserver
theavataroftime 2665 .r.e. akonadi_control
theavataroftime 2667 .r.e. akonadiserver
theavataroftime 2670 Fr.e. mysqld
theavataroftime 2714 .r.e. akonadi_contact
theavataroftime 2715 .r.e. akonadi_contact
theavataroftime 2716 .r.e. akonadi_ical_re
theavataroftime 2717 .r.e. akonadi_ical_re
theavataroftime 2718 .r.e. akonadi_maildir
theavataroftime 2719 .r.e. akonadi_maildis
theavataroftime 2720 .r.e. akonadi_nepomuk
theavataroftime 2721 .r.e. akonadi_vcard_r
theavataroftime 2739 .r.e. nepomukserver
theavataroftime 2741 .r.e. nepomukservices
theavataroftime 2747 .r.e. kaccess
theavataroftime 2759 fr.e. krunner
theavataroftime 2765 Fr.e. virtuoso-t
theavataroftime 2772 Fr.e. kio_http_cache_
theavataroftime 2774 .r.e. kmix
theavataroftime 2782 Fr.e. konsole
theavataroftime 2785 .r.e. kjots
theavataroftime 2790 .r.e. bash
theavataroftime 2807 .r.e. kalarm
theavataroftime 2809 fr.e. kopete
theavataroftime 2812 .r.e. polkit-kde-auth
theavataroftime 2815 .r.e. kwin
theavataroftime 2821 .r.e. dolphin
theavataroftime 2822 Fr.e. firefox
theavataroftime 2834 .r.e. kwalletd
theavataroftime 2839 .r.e. kwalletmanager
theavataroftime 2842 Frce. gconfd-2
theavataroftime 2850 .r.e. python
theavataroftime 2854 .rce. wicd-client
theavataroftime 2858 .r.e. klipper
theavataroftime 2861 .r.e. nepomukservices
theavataroftime 2862 .r.e. nepomukservices
theavataroftime 2865 .r.e. nepomukservices
theavataroftime 2867 .r.e. nepomukservices
theavataroftime 2868 .r.e. nepomukservices
theavataroftime 2869 .r.e. nepomukservices
theavataroftime 2870 .r.e. nepomukservices
theavataroftime 2871 .r.e. korgac
theavataroftime 2883 fr.e. kmozillahelper
theavataroftime 2979 .r.e. amarokapp
theavataroftime 2989 .r.e. plugin-containe
theavataroftime 3010 .r.e. npviewer.bin
theavataroftime 3048 Fr.e. kdeinit
theavataroftime 3051 Fr.e. dcopserver
theavataroftime 3053 Fr.e. klauncher
theavataroftime 3055 fr.e. kded
theavataroftime 3075 .r.e. ruby
theavataroftime 3081 fr.e. kio_file
theavataroftime 15311 .r.e. kio_http
theavataroftime 15312 .r.e. kio_http
theavataroftime 15313 .r.e. kio_http
theavataroftime 15314 .r.e. kio_http
theavataroftime 15315 .r.e. kio_http
theavataroftime 15316 .r.e. kio_http
fuser -v -m /dev/sdb1
USER PID ACCESS COMMAND
/dev/sdb1: root kernel mount /media/media-server/1
I ran 'fsck.reiserfs --check' one /dev/sdf1, which is the /media/media-server/5 hard drive.
Here are the results:
fsck.reiserfs --check /dev/sdf1
reiserfsck 3.6.21 (2009 www.namesys.com)
** If you are using the latest reiserfsprogs and it fails **
** please email bug reports to [email protected], **
** providing as much information as possible -- your **
** hardware, kernel, patches, settings, all reiserfsck **
** messages (including version), the reiserfsck logfile, **
** check the syslog file for any related information. **
** If you would like advice on using this program, support **
** is available for $25 at www.namesys.com/support.html. **
Will read-only check consistency of the filesystem on /dev/sdf1
Will put log info to 'stdout'
Do you want to run this program?[N/Yes] (note need to type Yes if you do):Yes
reiserfsck --check started at Mon Sep 27 19:21:20 2010
Replaying journal: Done.
Reiserfs journal '/dev/sdf1' in blocks [18..8211]: 0 transactions replayed
Checking internal tree.. finished
Comparing bitmaps..finished
Checking Semantic tree:
finished
No corruptions found
There are on the filesystem:
Leaves 77863
Internal nodes 474
Directories 2856
Other files 18718
Data block pointers 77184421 (0 of them are zero)
Safe links 0
reiserfsck finished at Mon Sep 27 19:29:03 2010
Also I just used Partition Manager to check /media/media-server/5 as well.
Check and repair partition '/dev/sdf1' (465.76 GiB, reiser)
Job: Check file system on partition '/dev/sdf1'
Command: fsck.reiserfs --fix-fixable -q -y /dev/sdf1
reiserfsck 3.6.21 (2009 www.namesys.com)
** If you are using the latest reiserfsprogs and it fails **
** please email bug reports to [email protected], **
** providing as much information as possible -- your **
** hardware, kernel, patches, settings, all reiserfsck **
** messages (including version), the reiserfsck logfile, **
** check the syslog file for any related information. **
** If you would like advice on using this program, support **
** is available for $25 at www.namesys.com/support.html. **
Will check consistency of the filesystem on /dev/sdf1
and will fix what can be fixed without --rebuild-tree
Will put log info to 'stdout'
reiserfsck --fix-fixable started at Wed Oct 6 22:29:02 2010
Replaying journal: Replaying journal: Done.
Reiserfs journal '/dev/sdf1' in blocks [18..8211]: 0 transactions replayed
Checking internal tree..
***I'm cutting most of this out, it's insanely long: \|/-\|/-\|finished
Comparing bitmaps..Bad nodes were found, Semantic pass skipped
3 found corruptions can be fixed only when running with --rebuild-tree
reiserfsck finished at Wed Oct 6 22:36:43 2010
block 32772: The level of the node (48287) is not correct, (1) expected
the problem in the internal node occured (32772), whole subtree is skipped
block 262149: The level of the node (28423) is not correct, (1) expected
the problem in the internal node occured (262149), whole subtree is skipped
block 11326: The level of the node (63701) is not correct, (1) expected
the problem in the internal node occured (11326), whole subtree is skipped
vpf-10630: The on-disk and the correct bitmaps differs. Will be fixed later.
Check file system on partition '/dev/sdf1': Error
Check and repair partition '/dev/sdf1' (465.76 GiB, reiser): Error
Thanks for the advice.
Last edited by The Avatar of Time (2010-10-07 05:53:05)

External Hard Drive won't load, Disk Utility and System Profiler crashes,

I've had the WD 1TB Passport for Mac for about a year now and as of this afternoon, my MacBook Pro stopped recognizing it. It's encrypted so when I plugged it in, my computer asked me for my password, but then it said there was an error and wouldn't mount. After restarting the computer, the password prompt for my external drive didn't even pop up. I can hear the hard drive spinning and the light flashes for a good 30 seconds before going solid. I have tested my USB ports with flash drives and they are reading them just fine. I tried to run Disk Utility but it goes into the never-ending loading mode. So then I go to the "About my Mac" page and clicked on storage, and the profiler crashed (never-ending loading). Can anyone help me? It was working just fine up until today. I even tried different Micro USB chords on it. This drive is incredibly important to me and I would appreciate not having to erase anything from it (kinda defeats the purpose of backing up a computer if the external hard drive is the one needing the backup).
I have a
Mid 2010 13in MacBook Pro
OS X 10.8.2
1TB WD Passport for Mac

Solution may be found if you search in the "More Like This" section over in the right column.

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).

Internal Hard Drive Won't Boot or Mount

I don't know if this is the right forum for this but...
My 24" iMac running 10.5.2 won't start up. Meaning I can't get past the grey screen. I fsck the disk in single user mode and got back "invalid nobe structure (4,19621)" and repairs failed, then quickly shut down. As I understand it the (4,19621) means that the file with catalog node ID 19621 in the Catalog B-Tree portion of the disk directory has an invalid extent entry. I might be wrong here. If any knows how to correct that problem that would be helpful. But thats not the real problem.
I should add I tried to boot from the install DVD and repair the disk with disk utility and it would not repair the disk either.
Disk Utility recognizes the disk as "232.9 GB AAPL Firewire Target Media" and thats all while in target disk mode.
The real problem is the disk won't mount in firewire target disk mode. I would like to try to recover some of the fills that I haven't backed up mainly in my documents folder or repair this problem.
I am going to install (well not me) a new hard drive Monday and have a fresh and new system but in the mean time I would like to try to recover some of my files if possible.
I should add the one time it did mount, all the folders were there but none of the files. And it gave no worrying. I checked the S.M.A.R.T. status and the start up volume yesterday and got the report the disks seems to be okay.
Any help in getting the disk to mount in firewire target disk mode to repair and/or recover some files would help.
Message was edited by: windylove

Thank you for the reply. That was the best and most logical reply.
DW never got to that point if thats what you are talking about nor did it get past "Inspecting disk" and Step 1: Searching entire disk in final rescue attempt". After hours of the beach ball spinning.
I am not within my apple care 3 years time frame. When they replace the hard drive tomorrow they said they might be able to recover some of my data in my Users folder.
Do you think that is possible?
That is more what I am worried about at this point. All of my important files have been back up there are just a few that weren't.
You confirmed what I was thinking. Thanks

IMac internal hard drive won't mount/can't be repaired

hi there,
my 11yo son has been using my older imac. it's a 24" 2.4ghz imac with a 500gb drive from around 2007, i think. anyway, yesterday he said it was acting funny, he restarted it and it hung on the grey screen with the logo.
i looked at it more closely today and tried restarting in safe mode, tried the PRAM thing, and got no where. i then booted from the 10.6 dvd that i have. i ran disk utility and tried verifying and repairing it. it said there was a missing thread record (id = 92600) and an invalid sibling link. it tried to rebuild catalog b-tree.
then it said that disk utility can't repair the disk. i tried to re-install the system software, but disk utility couldn't mount it.
the system profiler can see the disk, but as i mentioned, i can't get it to mount and am sort of at a loss here. thought? ideas?
thanks in advance,
emily

Your HD seems to have crashed. I would recommend running Apple Hardware test 3x in Extended Mode, if you get error codes as I supsect this will confirm the problem. If you aren't familiar with AHT you will need the original install discs that shipped with the computer and you can find instructions at:
support.apple.com/kb/ht1509
If it errors your next step is taking it in for repair at your local Apple Store or AASP.

Internal hard drive won't mount after running Tech Tools Pro 5

HELP.
We have an imac 2ghz Intel Core 2 running OS 10.6.8.
I ran Tech Tools Pro 5 to rebuild directory, optimize files, optimize volume. It ran over nightbut seemed to hang up optimizing the volume.
Now the HD doesn't mount.
I've tried a few fixes. Including running disk utility from a CD. The disk utility says the directory is okay but doesn't see the HD to verify or repair permissions.
I've tried zapping the pram and safe boot, neither of which worked.
I've been able to use the computer by booting from an external start up hd.
Oddly, I ran a Time Machine back up prior to running TTP, but for some reason the only back up I see is from 3 months ago.
Not sure why the recent back up didn't happen, but were missing some very important recent docs.
I downloaded a trial version of Stellar Pheonix Mac Data Recovery and it seems to be able to see all of the data on the main HD.
I'm wondering whether or not to spend $100 for full version to attempt to restore content of HD to an external.
If I do this, I assume I'll have to erase the HD and reinstall data from the Stellar Pheonix collection, hoping that it's all intact.
Does anyone have any other suggestions to get the HD mounted????

Hi, never "Optimize" a drive before Repairing it AND having a backup clone to boot from.
I assume I'll have to erase the HD and reinstall data from the Stellar Pheonix collection, hoping that it's all intact.
No, I don't think you want an erase at all, you want a freah external drive to recover to first off.

My white 13" Macbook's hard drive won't load

Took my white 13" MacBook to the Geek Squad at Best Buy yesterday who gave me some tricks to try and restore the HD. Held the option button down while powering up and the screen showed 2 HD's to choose from (Mac HD and Recovery HD). I selected the Recovery HD and tried to restore it from our Time Capsule which took over 6 hours. When I woke up this morning, the screen was completely white and restoration was unsuccessful. Any other tricks?

I'm far from an expert. I'm going through a similar thing, but don't have a back up.
Anway, one suggestion: When you start up hold down shift-CMD-V. This is the same as just holding down shift, which does a safe mode boot, but is the "verbose" version, so it'll come out with a whole lot of stuff that probably won't make much sense but it may throw some light onto it. For me I'm getting an I/O error, which I believe indicates the HD is physically damaged, but I'm not sure on that.

Snow leopard installation disc won't boot. Can I reset computer to boot from internal hard drive at startup?

I recently installed snow leopard on my macbook (mid 2006). I used system preferences to set the snow leopard boot disc as the install disc, and now my computer won't boot. It stalls at the apple icon with the grey screen. Is there any way I can set my computer to reboot from my internal hard drive at startup without having access to system prefernces (a keyboard code or something)?

Thank you so much for responding. I actually just pushed the trackpad button at startup. It ejected the install disc and automatically booted from the internal. I am sure your method would have worked as well. Thanks again!

Mini won't boot up from internal hard drive

Greetings,
I can't get my Mac Mini to boot from it's internal hard drive. It just gets stuck at the grey apple screen wth the spinning gear, nonstop. Booting in safe mode produced the same behavior (still wouldn't boot). DiskWarrior fixed some directory problems and found some corrupted microsoft office files which I deleted but it still won't boot. It boots fine off an external USB drive.
I've tried disconnecting all peripherals except keyboard, mouse, and monitor, resetting NVRAM/PRAM, and reinstalling the OS over the existing one (but not a clean install).
Disk Utility and DiskWarrior both now say the boot drive is fine, but of course it still gets stuck at the grey boot screen.
Booting in verbose mode it shows the following errors and then hangs:
disk0s2: I/O error.
0 [Level 3] [ReadUID 0] [Facility com.apple.system.fs] [EffType IO] [ErrNo 5] [IOType Read] [PBlkNum 533720112] [LBlkNum 0] [FSLogMsgID 884471847] [FSLogMsgOrder First]
0 [Level 3] [ReadUID 0] [Facility com.apple.system.fs] [DevNode /dev/disk0s2] [MountPt /] [Path /usr/llbexec/configd/ ..namedfork/rsrc] [FSLogMsgID 88471047] [FSLogMsgOrder Last]
/SourceCache/AppleFSCompression/AppleFSCompression-24.4/Common/commonUtilsKern.c :344 VNOP_GETXATTR com.apple.ResourceFork for /usr/libexec/configd: 5: error
/SourceCache/AppleFSCompression/AppleFSCompression-24.4/Compressors/Type4/compre ssorTyp4Imp.c:328: readBytes /usr/libexec/configd: -1: error
decmpfs.c:1307:decmpfs_read_compressed: decmpfs_fetch_uncompressed_data err -1
Other than a complete wipe and reinstall I don't know what else to try.
Thanks!
- LW

Hmmm,
qErr
= -1, /*queue element not found during deletion*/
Failing in /usr/libexec/configd makes me think some file like...
/usr/standalone/bootcaches.plist
/private/var/db/BootCache.playlist
Is possibly corrupt.

Why won't my Intel iMac boot up, either from the internal hard drive or the DVD drive? It just displays a light grey screen, without any other icons, etc. The fact that it won't boot from the original system DVD is what baffles me the most. Any ideas?

Why won't my Intel iMac boot up, either from the internal hard drive or the DVD drive? It just displays a light grey screen, without any other icons, etc. The fact that it won't boot from the original system DVD is what baffles me the most. Any ideas? It uses the latest version of Mavericks. Thanks!

If the C key for Install Disc or R Command for OS X Recovery startup commands are not working, try holding the Option key for the Startup Manager.
see > Startup Manager: How to select a startup volume
If that does not work and you using a wireless keyboard, it may have become unpaired and you need to dig up a USB keyboard to invoke the startup commands.
For more on gray screen, see > Mac OS X: Gray screen appears during startup

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."

Will Apple stores in Germany replace your iPhone if there is internal hard drive problems from a phone from the US. I am studying abroad and won't be home until December

Will Apple stores in Germany replace your iPhone if there is internal hard drive problems from a phone from the US. I am studying abroad and won't be home until December

You can try, but the iPhone warranty terms state that Apple "may" restrict warranty/service to country of original purchase...key word here is "may".
Good luck.

Internal Hard Drive Won't Load

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