Mountain Lion Hangs on Boot when an external cloned drive is attached

It seems that, for me at least, when I have an external drive, in this case a usb, plugged in on boot up, Mountain Lion just hangs. This external drive is used as a clone (I use Super Duper). It can hang in one of 2 places; after inputing my password, or when trying to bring up the desktop. It is very consistent as to the hanging. When the external drive which contains the clone is not attached, it boots fine every time. I have no problems at all with my other external drives being plugged in at boot. They are just contain data. Is Mountain Lion getting confused? Anyone else experience this?

I am stumped too. The issue is that the 'pmset -g' command does not allow changing the ExternalMedia flag.
An observation that may be relevant to this topic is as follows: if you unmount the drive (but not physically disconnect it), sleep comes in the specified time. Upon wakeup, however, the drive is mounted again to the desktop. I've noticed this behavior with SD cards, and I assume that HDs should do the same.
If this is the case, then it may be possible to use ControlPlane (current version is ControlPlane-1.1.4) and create an "about to sleep" situation, which triggers USB disk unmounting. Haven't tried it, but was thinking to (subsequently just gave up and eject my USB storage manually).
Hope this helps.
Xen

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OS is Mountain Lion, upgraded no problems, used an external Hard drive for my time machine, now my iPhoto will not show any of my photo's or ay new ones I import! Help please!!

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Do you get this window when you hold down the Command+Option keys and launch iPhoto?
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Mountain Lion hangs during boot sequence after reinstall

I am running Mountain Lion on a late-2012 Mac Mini (the newest one at this writing), and my system got messed up after I tried to reset my primary uid to 501 (I know, first mistake) after having migrated the system from an older Mac Mini. This worked partially, but I continued to have issues accessing some files and got tired of resetting the permissions manually.
I tried reinstalling Mountain Lion and since then, the system fails to boot completely. I can get as far as seeing the desktop, Finder menu, Dock, etc., but then one or more error windows pop up relating to specific resources (I think Calendar Agent was one of them, I can't remember because I then saw the spinning disk icon and the system stopped responding). I tried restarting by turning the computer off and then on again, but continue to get similar errors after it gets almost all the way through booting.
Although I have much of my data on the hard drive backed up to an external Seagate drive on my home network, I had not been able to do a complete backup because I have many old (pre-OS X) files that contain slashes or other characters no longer allowed in filenames, and it has proven too cumbersome to update all the filenames to make it worthwhile. Thus, I am not able to wipe the hard drive and start from scratch.
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Any advice about how to diagnose and/or solve this problem? I would like to be able to correct any uid and gid conflicts that may be causing this, which I believe would work, but am not sure how to do this. I am writing this from Safari after booting in Recovery mode.
Thanks for any help with this. - Klingon725

Back up all data.
This procedure will unlock all your user files (not system files) and reset their ownership and access-control lists to the default. If you've set special values for those attributes on any of your files, they will be reverted. In that case, either stop here, or be prepared to recreate the settings if necessary. Do so only after verifying that those settings didn't cause the problem. If none of this is meaningful to you, you don't need to worry about it.
Step 1
If you have more than one user account, and the one in question is not an administrator account, then temporarily promote it to administrator status in the Users & Groups preference pane. To do that, unlock the preference pane using the credentials of an administrator, check the box marked Allow user to administer this computer, then reboot. You can demote the problem account back to standard status when this step has been completed.
Triple-click the following line to select it. Copy the selected text to the Clipboard (command-C):
{ sudo chflags -R nouchg,nouappnd ~ $TMPDIR.. ; sudo chown -Rh $UID:staff ~ $_ ; sudo chmod -R u+rwX ~ $_ ; chmod -R -N ~ $_ ; } 2> /dev/null
Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.
Paste into the Terminal window (command-V). You'll be prompted for your login password, which won't be displayed when you type it. You may get a one-time warning not to screw up. If you don’t have a login password, you’ll need to set one before you can run the command. If you see a message that your username "is not in the sudoers file," then you're not logged in as an administrator.
The command will take a noticeable amount of time to run. Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign (“$”) to appear, then quit Terminal.
Step 2 (optional)
The first step should give you usable permissions in your home folder. This step will restore special attributes set by OS X on some user folders to protect them from unintended deletion or renaming. You can skip this step if you don't consider that protection to be necessary.
Boot into Recovery by holding down the key combination command-R at startup. Release the keys when you see a gray screen with a spinning dial.
When the OS X Utilities screen appears, select
Utilities ▹ Terminal
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In the Terminal window, type this:
resetpassword
That's one word, all lower case, with no spaces. Then press return. A Reset Password window will open. You’re not going to reset a password.
Select your boot volume ("Macintosh HD," unless you gave it a different name) if not already selected.
Select your username from the menu labeled Select the user account if not already selected.
Under Reset Home Directory Permissions and ACLs, click the Reset button.
Select
 ▹ Restart
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Mountain Lion is missing, after installing an external hard drive and Carbon Copy Clone.

I have a mid-2007 desktop iMac Model MA877LL, 2.4 ghz/1gb/320gb, with 4 GB memory, upgraded to Mountain Lion 9/7/2012 at an Apple store (now 10.8.5). I just installed a new external hard drive Fantom Drive 1T G-Force Mega Disk Firewire 800, then installed Carbon Copy Clone successfully. However, I could not get the clone to boot from the backup volume. Mountain Lion showed in both Macintosh HD and External Hard Drive at that point. After working through many steps with CCC, trying to get it to boot, the final suggestion was to try installing Mountain Lion onto the backup disk via the Mac App Store Installer. As my Mountain Lion was installed at an Apple store, there's no record of it on line and I can't find an installer, although I've been doing updates as they're issued. Per article, "OS X: Installing OS X on an external volume", I erased and reformatted the storage device. Now, checking my Macintosh HD, Mountain Lion is gone. How do I get it back?

Woodswalker wrote:
...Per article, "OS X: Installing OS X on an external volume", I erased and reformatted the storage device. Now, checking my Macintosh HD, Mountain Lion is gone. How do I get it back?
Are you saying that your internal HD doesn't have an operating system on it either, meaning you can't boot your iMac at all? Or that the external was also named "Macintosh HD" in which case, having been erased and reformatted (hopefully with a GUID partition table), you'll need to clone your internal to it once again.

Lion won't sleep when my external USB drive is connected

Hi guys,
I've searched the forums and can't find anyone with quite the same problem I'm experiencing here. I've noticed that my power saving settings are not being actioned properly on my 2011 mac mini, in that the system never goes to sleep at the specified interval.
This isn't a problem that the system will not sleep at all, if I manually put the computer to sleep it obeys and goes to sleep instantly, also when using Plex media centre software, and allowing it to control the system sleep state, it also works fine.
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Listed by owning process:
pid 20: [0x0000012c00000014] ExternalMedia named: "com.apple.powermanagement.externalmediamounted"
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I am stumped too. The issue is that the 'pmset -g' command does not allow changing the ExternalMedia flag.
An observation that may be relevant to this topic is as follows: if you unmount the drive (but not physically disconnect it), sleep comes in the specified time. Upon wakeup, however, the drive is mounted again to the desktop. I've noticed this behavior with SD cards, and I assume that HDs should do the same.
If this is the case, then it may be possible to use ControlPlane (current version is ControlPlane-1.1.4) and create an "about to sleep" situation, which triggers USB disk unmounting. Haven't tried it, but was thinking to (subsequently just gave up and eject my USB storage manually).
Hope this helps.
Xen

Mountain Lion Time Machine Encryption Fails with External Thunderbolt Drive

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Selecting repair disk also does not work as the drive fails to mount.
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I called the manufacturer of the drive and they state it is "Apple's problem".
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seejoefish wrote:
I called the manufacturer of the drive and they state it is "Apple's problem".
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When I try and install CS2 on OS Mountain Lion is saying I have a Non HFS drive

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When I boot with the usb hard drive connected to any usb port on the computer, the computer hangs forever at boot time. If I unplug the drive and reboot, everything is fine. I was able to fix the problem by disabling the USB support in the bios but then, none of the USB ports work in Windows.
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Hello jeantremblay44,
As I understand the laptop cannot boot if the external USB drive is connected.
Kindly try the following troubleshooting step
You can make the USB boot disable from BIOS and make the first boot device as Hard Disk
Best Regards,
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I upgraded to Mountain Lion (MacbookPro). Now when I open ical I get a popup window with a list I had added to Reminders app with the message 'Your calendar couldn't be refreshed' it won't go away-'delete' is greyed out-can't access calendar! Help!

I upgraded to Mountain Lion (MacbookPro). Now when I open ical I get a popup window with a list I had added to Reminders app with the message 'Your calendar couldn't be refreshed' i--t won't go away-'delete' is greyed out--can't access calendar! Help!

I upgraded to Mountain Lion (MacbookPro). Now when I open ical I get a popup window with a list I had added to Reminders app with the message 'Your calendar couldn't be refreshed' i--t won't go away-'delete' is greyed out--can't access calendar! Help!

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I use the Boot Camp assistant to create a partition. It them reboots and never starts up from the optical drive. I get an Apple logo alternating with a stop sign.
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I am seriously discouraged by what seems to be Apple wanting to control everything. I had a Mac Pro and Air book in my future but now, it's on hold.
Thanks in advance,
Kevin

I tried what you are doing with a 2007 MBP, and could not get any Windows CD s to boot from an external optical drive, firewire or USB.
I think this is fundamental to Windows which won't boot from an external USB drive either even on a Windows machine (although I believe there may be complex ways of achieving this). I don't think this is Apple trying to control the world.
I ended up taking the MCE Optibay out and putting the original optical drive back in.
Just possible that something has changed between a 2007 MBP and 2010 MBP, but I doubt it.
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2. Parallels, which has come a long way in the last two years. I am 99% certain that Parallels will install from an external optical.
Message was edited by: Mike Boreham
Message was edited by: Mike Boreham
Message was edited by: Mike Boreham

How do I move a partition on my mac hard drive, to an external hard drive so that i can run windows when the external hard drive is connected

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Mountain Lion Hangs on Boot when an external cloned drive is attached

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