OS does not see Hard Drive - will not mount.

After I replaced a LaCie drive with a G-Drive in my Firewire daisy chain, my other LaCie (TimeMachine) drive no longer works.
My devices are connected as follows: [MacBook Pro]---Firewire 800--->[G-Drive 2TB]---FW800--->[G-Drive 2TB (new)]---FW800--->[G-Drive Mini 500GB w/power supply]---FW400--->[LaCie 500GB (TimeMachine)]
The System Profiler sees all four drives but doesn't show complete information for the LaCie drive. Disk Utility only sees the G-Tech Drives. The OS only sees the G-Tech drives. I have swapped cables. I have swapped power supplies (for the LaCie drive). The LaCie drive works as expected when connected directly to the PowerBook
Prior to that, my drives worked as expected when connected as follows:
[MacBook Pro]---Firewire 800--->[G-Drive 2TB]---FW800--->[G-Drive Mini 500GB w/power supply]---FW400--->[LaCie 500GB (TimeMachine)]---FW400--->[LaCie 500GB]
I'm running 10.8.2. I have a 13" MacBook Pro with 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with a 250GB HD and 8GB of RAM.
Any ideas woull be appreciated.

Thanks. I'll give it a try. You had the same problem?

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This is a somewhat long post, but the point is this: I have a new 1TB Fantom GreenDrive (attached via USB) which I cannot partition the way that I want to. I want to allocate 300G for a Time Machine backup partition and the remainder as a partition for everything else. For some reason, I'm only able to partition the drive so that it has two equal-size partitions. While this isn't terrible (the 300G figure was somewhat arbitrary), I'm curious to see if anyone knows what's going on here. As part of my tale, I list three "mysteries" that have really stumped me.
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If I booted the Mac into Windows, I could format the drive again as NTSF, and it would work fine. When I went back into the Mac side, it worked there, too (that is, I could read from it and write to it). Also, I could use Disk Utility to format the drive as MS-DOS (FAT). Of course, I needed to format the drive for the Mac so that it would work for Time Machine.
When I went into the Time Machine preference pane and selected the GreenDrive for Backup (which was still formatted as MS-DOS (FAT) at the time), and did the erasing from within Time Machine, I was able to get the drive formatted as one large Mac OS formatted partition. Why I was able to successfully format it from Time Machine, but not from Disk Utility (which I believe is what Time Machine uses for the erasing, anyway) is the second mystery.
So, now I had a 1TB hard drive set up a single partition. I still wanted to divide it in two. However, when I tried using Disk Utility to partition it the way I wanted, I got an error saying the partition failed. Just as a test, I tried partitioning as two equal-size partitions, and this worked. Why it would let me partition in this configuration, and not the way I wanted, is the third and final mystery.
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<Edited by Moderator>

Be sure your drive is initially partitioned into one single volume. Then format the volume for Mac OS Extended. Once that's done re-partition the drive into two volumes (if that's what you desire) then resize them as you want. How you do the resizing may be important. Usually the larger volume is the first or top volume. Select it by clicking on its rectangle in the sizing gadget. Then in the Size field enter the size you want. That should result in the first volume being resized to what you want and the second volume automatically resizes accordingly.
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1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder. If you need to reformat your startup volume, then you must boot from your OS X Installer Disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Installer menu (Utilities menu for Tiger or Leopard.)
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6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.

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I took the problematic hard drive and installed it in my Mac Mini so I could attempt a Safe Boot and then Archive and Install if necessary.
Safe Mode didn't work. The drive produced the circle with a slash symbol.
I reset the PRAM which was part of a list of steps to work through I found created by Apple Support.
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I attempted Archive and Install however when it went to show what target drives were available it was a blank box and all buttons were grayed out.
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It still would not mount. I ran Verify again and again said "Invalid content in Journal" and this time it stopped midway saying "The volume was found corrupt and needs to be repaired. Error: This disk needs to be repaired. Click Repair Disk."
I clicked Repair and it ended with The vol. was repaired successfully."
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willfrombelfast wrote:
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