Problem getting hard drives to mount on desktop and also open when they do

I have a problem getting the iMac to recognise external hard drives - it won't show them on either firewire 400 or 800. I can see my 1TB drive using usb ( it shows up on the desktop, whereas on firewire it doesn't do this) but if I try to open it and see the contents in finder, it opens, but doesn't display the contents of the drive. I can see the disk size but just get a grey spinning wheel in the bottom right hand of the finder window. Timemachine does not work with this drive. it used to but then stopped. It sees the drive but cannot back up to it.

What brand drive is it? Check to see how the drive has been formatted. From the desktop right click/Get Info.
If your iMac is having Firewire issues try resetting the SMC: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1543?viewlocale=en_US
Open up Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility select the external drive on the left hand side and under the First Aid tab click Repair Disk.
If the drive is formatted for Windows NTFS+ or FAT32 then you will need to erase the drive and reformat it for Mac OS Extended. Make sure to backup any data before reformatting.
George

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Is it possible to use an external hard drive for time machine backup and also as a regular hard drive?

Is it possible to use an external hard drive for time machine backup and also as a regular hard drive?

I am using an external drive in the exact way that you described. You just keep it plugged in to the computer when you want to access the movies and files. In order to put files on it, just go to finder open up the drive under devices and drag and drop files onto the drive. It is just like using a usb drive with a terabyte of space.

I cannot get my hard drive to mount on desktop

Today I had to erase my internal (start-up) hard drive and reinstall Mountain Line (ML) and although the reinstall seems to have occurred correctly - the iMac will now start up and run properly - the icon for the internal hard drive does not appear on the desktop along with the other disk icons. When I hold the option key down during start-up the Hard Drive icon shows up among the other drives attached to my Mac - but the icon or image of the internal hard drive does not appear on the desktop. I tried to use Disk Utility to mount the disk, but even though the disk is listed and shown in the left most column of the Disk Utility window - the drive will not mount on the desktop
I seem to remember that the same thing happened when I originally installed Mountain Line on this machine - and after poking around in countless menus I found an option that when selected caused the internal hard drive to mount on the desktop just fine. But I've not been able to find that option thus far with the newest version of ML. And a search of the "Help" system was useless.
Can anyone shed some light on the resolution of this problem?
Thanks

Finder - Preferences - General - click the boxes you want for "Show these items on the Desktop"

Hard drive not mounting to desktop/computer

I am setting up my AirPort Extreme 802.11 with an attached 300GB LaCie Brick hard drive with iTunes library. I can see that the Brick is recognized in the AirPort Utility > disks page, but it will not load onto my computer and I can not access it. I have the utility set to auto mount disks and have even tried to manually mount the disc, but it will not appear on the desktop. Am I missing something?
PowerBook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.6)

Hello,
I've got the same situation pretty much exactly.
I am using a Lacie porsche 250g USB disk.
Airport Disk Utility doesn't see the volume.
Airport Utility sees it just fine, but it is not showing on the desktop as it was in the past.
The AEBS was working, and the disk was being mounted properly until I began trying different configurations to allow my networked PC to also see the volume.
It seems to have started after I had set up the AEBS to assign access to the disk using accounts. I set up a couple accounts, just to see how they worked, and restarted the AEBS, but the volume did not appear. I set it back to the initial setting requiring password for disk access, and I've not managed to get it working properly again.
Any help at all would be fantastic.

External Hard Drive not mounting on Desktop

Hello,
I use a 250 gb Lacie external hard drive (firewire) for backup. For the past week, the external hard drive has mostly not been mounting on the desktop.
I don't think it's a power issue, because after turning the unit on both the light indicating power turns on and I can hear the motor operating.
As indicated on the Lacie web site, I went to disk utility in system preferences and repaired disk permissions for my Mac's hard drive volume. That doesn't seem to have made a difference.
Does anyone have any other suggestions as to what I should do?
Thank you,
Manny

Hi gavvx, and a warm welcome to the forums!
Feel free to start a new topic of your own will get more individualized attention, and many more helpers!
It can be hard to sometimes find where to start a New Topic, so here's the link...
http://discussions.apple.com/post!default.jspa?forumID=758
Did you try highlighting them, then the Mount button in Disk Utility?

External hard drive not mounting on desktop or being accessible - help!!!

Hello,
I use an Iomega 160GB external hardrive to store my iTunes and a load of video files as well as back up to but at the moment I can't get it to mount. It is visible in system profiler but I can't access any of the files. I tried verifying it and repairing it in disk utility but both of these failed. If any of you could help me out I would really appreciate it - I do have another copy of all my files on my iMac at home but i am currently studying in Spain and won't be going back till Christmas so need to get this drive up and running!

welcome to macbook forum.
try to reset PRAM to refresh your macbook port.
check the power adapter, if it comes with it, use it or check if the power adapter still good and supplied the power properly.
connect your external to other mac (you can connect to PC if it formatted as FAT32), if it succedd, back up your data and repair / reformat using that other mac.
Good Luck.

Cant get hard drive to mount

my 12 inch g4 powerbook which i love started to get slower and then eventually stopped working - flashing ? when i started it. Wouldnt start from install disc as couldnt see the HD icon -so i ran disk warrior which said it couldnt repair directory on HD- got a new hard disc fitted it ok but when i try to install tiger i cant as the hd icon doesnt appear - tried starting from disk warrior but again HD isnt an option to click on - when i go to disc utility - HD is there but dont know why can install.
anyone any ideas on where to go - i just want to rescue it as its a great machine
arif

You're almost there .... bring up disk utitlity again, choose the new hard drive, and choose partition, name the hard drive, choose format mac OS extended (journaled), give it a size (most likely the entire drive will be one partitition), and under options make sure Apple partition map is chosen. Click partition, and you should now be able to install Tiger.

What happens when the external icon jumps on top on the hard drive icon on the desktop?

The external drive icon jumped to the hard drive icon on the desktop and after that happen the iMAC started running slow. Not sure how that happen or what is happening to the iMAC after it happen. All my applications are running and launching slow. Also, when I tried moving files to the external drive I'll get a "error code -36". When I looked up the error message it says that the file is corrupted even though I could still open them. How can I fix this problem and not lose any files? Thanks for any help.

RRFS has probably got the answer basically - but the combined contents of the two drives has probably maxed out the drive space on Macintosh HD, meaning the OS can't use virtual memory properly.
Open a Finder window and read the available space at the bottom.
If you have copied the drive, it should show as a folder under Macintosh HD in the Finder.
I hesitate to tell you to delete the whole folder as that may be too much for Finder to cope with. Open the folder and delete files and folders in small chunks, emptying the trash each time before doing the next..
Meanwhile, if you go to the Finder preferences and uncheck the item for Hard Disks in the desktop list, then move the icon for the external away from that corner before re-enabling the Hard disk option.
You may need to go to View options from the right-click menu on desktop and set 'arrange by' to 'none' in order to get the icon to stay where you want it.

How do I get a crashed Powermac G4 hard drive to mount?

I have a Western Digital 20GB Ata hard drive that has crashed badly. Despite reading other forum posts here and trying out the useful suggestions, I have been unsuccessful in remounting my hard drive. This has denied me access to a precious archive of work e-mails in my macmail mail-box, and other home office work data including Safari bookmarks tracked via the now non-existent user preferences folder.
This is all information that I would really like to recover without sending to a data recovery company. The loss of data access has been stressful for me over the last several days.
Fortunately, I always stored my text edit, word, and other raw documents on a subsidiary drive. However, and this is unfortunate, backups of my "home folder" fell of the radar due to some significant health issues over the past couple of years. Now, I'm paying the price for that loss of focus.
I'm running a Powermac G4 AGP machine with 1.5ghz fastmac processor, 1.75gb ram, OSX 10.4.11. This has been a good computer for my home office work including e-mails, web browsing etc. The main drive in a two drive setup has been a 20gb Apple branded hard drive Western digital drive that was reported full before the crash. This was after the console log file in the system folder reported large gigabyte file logs.
No major data has ever been stored on this hard drive, only the OS, yet it would fill up. This has happened in the past and I have been able to delete these files, then restart the computer thus clearing hard drive space. I've done this for the last two years.
Two weeks ago when the computer reported low hard disk space, I had a several safari windows open. The computer then froze and the entire computer became totally unresponsive. I had to force power off the computer to get it to restart.
Since then, despite using disk utilities like Techtool, Disk Warrior, Prosoft Drive Genius, Prosoft Data recovery and other software demos like Remo recover, Total Recall, Stellar Phoenix, and Virtual Lab the drive has never been "seen" by the OS to let the data recovery software access it.
I've also used techniques like Safe boot, Singe user mode, Target disk mode, plus mounting the drive in a Wiebetech Firewire 400 external enclosure, and still I've never managed to get the drive to be recognized by the system, let alone remount. All I got was the circle with a slash through it or the mac smiley icon that alternates with a question mark.
The 20Gb WD was the primary ide drive in a two drive setup that also has a Maxtor diamond Max Plus 9 60Gb ATA133 Hard drive which was my subsidiary drive for data storage. I have since mounted this drive when it was made the only drive on the ide cable (the Maxtor has 10.4.6 on it that I can boot from successfully). (If the Western Digital is either the primary or secondary drive on the joint ide cable, the Maxtor then fails to mount).
The crashed hard drive symptoms are:
On startup the Western Digital disk makes several whining noises like it wants to startup, and also sounds like it is trying to access the drive data platters, then it goes quiet. After making the drive the only drive on the ide cable, and rejumpering the drive accordingly, it is only making two whining or "coughing noises" like it wants to start, then goes quiet. In neither case, does the OS ever register its presence.
In the firewire enclosure the drive either starts with the first type of sound and then reverts to periodically making the second type of coughing sound or it just makes the "coughing sound".
Crashed Drive Description is:
WESTERN DIGITAL 20GB TRIDE 655T0022 WC93300Y5H7YA EIDE HARD DRIVE. Made August 18, 1999.
MDL (Model) is WD205BA-40AK.
Firmware is CRNBLKMO.
PRIMARY CONTROLLER BOARD (PCB) NUMBER ON WHITE LABEL JUST ABOVE DATA CONNECTOR IS 845000A 30M01G2V2E2 0056, Apple part # 655T0022
Has Apple logo and came with Sawtooth Machine 450Mhz that was upgraded to 1.5ghz via Fastmac processor and 1.75Gb CL2 Crucial Ram.
Any ideas or suggestions would be most welcome to get the drive to mount and then copy of my home folder data.
Thank you.

Hi Glen,
thank you for your response and suggestions. Truth be told, the old wives tale you mention is gospel for some depending on where one looks on the internet. There's actually a website dedicated to the discussion of crashed hard drives that was started by a guy who persisted in trying to look at alternatives because the professional data recovery option was too expensive for him to pursue.
He eventually had success with an exact make and model "donor" drive logic board swap and got all his data back. On the forum there and elsewhere many people swear by the freezer method as the only way they got their data back.
However, the option also has risks so has to be applied with care. So I'm not committed to pursuing that path and no I wouldn't blame you for putting the idea in my head or suggesting the link if I was to try it.
I'm also not currently trying to mount the hard drive but instead have spent some time researching my options prior to data recovery. I had the thought to find a database of failed or failing hard drive sounds so I could compare it to the sound my Western Digital is making. I eventually found a great place with failed hard drive sounds for all different makes and types (ironically run by a generous Data recovery company who want you to be able to determine whether their services are needed).
I compared the sound of my hard drive to several Western Digitals on their website plus the sound of dying hard drive on another site and was relieved to hear that my hard drive doesn't sound like it is dying. What it sounds closest to is the example of a fried logic board. In that instance a logic board swap remounted the drive. Many other people on the web have had success with this method, provided the drive is an exact or close match in manufacturing date, model type and firmware. (Some specialist companies can also burn the exact crashed drive firmware code into the donor drive's logic board.)
At best, if the firmware doesn't match, the drive simply spins up but doesn't mount. So at the moment I'm trying to locate an exact donor drive to do a board swap. Since the WD is an apple branded "Expert" rather than the more common Caviar drive this isn't easy but I'm hopeful.
Secondly, on another website I saw the suggestion to try mounting the drive into a PC or into bootcamp. The thought here is that when a hard drive is full it runs out of index room and starts overwriting itself. This in turn leads to data corruption. So if the Pc ignores the Western Digital generated data corruption errors that are taking down the ide bus in my mac, and mounts the drive it can help diagnose if data corruption is the problem or not.
Some here might think that mounting a drive in a pc is problematic, but it was suggested by a mac expert. Atleast the bootcamp option is something for me to look into first as it will keep the Western Digital on a mac.
That's where I am so far. Any other thoughts or suggestions are welcome.

I have lost my Hard Drive icon on my desktop. How do I get it back.

I have lost my Hard Drive icon on my desktop. How do I get it back.

Quick thing to try: from the Finder, select the View menu and then select "Clean Up" in case it has wandered somewhere almost off the desktop. Also, if it is "hiding" behind something, it will be revealed.

Problem accessing hard drive for more than one user at the same time

Hello all,
I recently bought a 2nd generation AirPort Extreeme 802.11n to replace a cheapo wireless router. The main reason I wanted to get the AirPort was so I could attach a USB hard drive which holds iTunes music files Originaly I had a G4 MDD and this was a second internal hard drive. Since my wife and son also share my Mac, we stored the iTunes music folder there, so we could all access the files. That worked fine.
Then I got a early 2009 iMac and gave my wife the G4. My son also has a G3 iBook, using the wireless internet conection. At first I had the drive in an external case attached via Firewire. Both my iMac and my wife's G4 are attached to the network using ethernet, not wireless. She was able to access the music files so long as my Mac was on, but the connection was flaky.
So as mentioned, I picked up a used AirPort Extreme from OWC, mainly to attach the hard drive, since it's no longer in my Mac. It took some fiddling, and I was honestly surpsied that the APE was trickier to set up than expected, but now I have the external drive mounting, and we can all access the files from any of the Macs in the house. It works great except for one thing. If I'm logged into my iMac, and then another family member logs in on the same iMac, we don't all have access to the hard drive. It's still mounted, but the you have no permission to view the files on it.
Then if I remount it, I can access the files, but now the other user can't.
So in a nutshell, only one user can access the drive at the same time from the iMac, but we can all access it from different Macs.
Anyone have an idea of why this is happening and how to remidy it?

This is the boilerplate text often used in connection to saving to a network (please NOTE the part where it explains that normally, it does work, but that it is impossible to troubleshoot someone else's network remotely, and that's why it's not supported by Adobe):
If you are opening files over a network or saving them to a network server, please cease and desist immediately in the event you are currently experiencing problems with one or more files. Working across a network is not supported.
See:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/406/kb406793.html
Copy the CLOSED file from your server to your local hard disk, work on it, save it again to your local hard disk, close it, and copy the closed file back to the server.
Of course, the fact that Adobe does not support working across a network does not necessarily mean it won't work. It should.
Adobe's position is that there are too many variables in a network environment for them to guarantee that everything will work correctly in every network, especially given the fact that if something does not work properly, it's probably the network's fault, and Adobe has no way of troubleshooting your network.
If you can't work locally, you are on your own, and if something happens, you're on your own. If you must work from a server, make sure your network administrator is a competent professional.
When problems arise, a lot of valuable work can be lost.

I had to reformat my hard drive on an older Desktop running Windowx XP. The IE browser is not working now. Is there a way I can download Firefox onto a flash drive from my new desktop and install it on my old desktop?

I had to reformat the hard drive on my old desktop. It is runninf Windows XP. I can't get Internet Explorer to work so I can connect to the internet via wireless. Is there a way I can download firefox from my new desktop onto a flas drive and then install Firefox from the flash drive onto my old desktop? If so, please explain the procedure.

Go to a suitable download page eg: [http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all.html]
Download firefox, use the save option rather than install.
Save it directly to the flash drive, or to somewhere on your computer and copy/move it the flash drive.
However if IE is not working possibly you have some sort of setup problem so firefox may not work either.

Big problems after hard drive failure - Please help.

About 2 weeks ago, my Macbook seized, and was sent to Apple to repair.
It was found that the hard drive failed, and 2 weeks later I received my macbook back with a new hard drive.
Luckily I had backed up my home drive and was able to restore it using backup.
Now this is where my problems start.
My home drive is not the same name ( I think - I can'r remember too well what it was called previously )
I have my entire music library backed up to an external hard drive, and mounting this hard drive is a REAL pain in the *** now.
Sometime it loads up, sometime it just doesn;t get recognised, and I can put the USB connection in and out 10 times before it mounts.
I have verified the disk, and nothing is wrong.
Does anyone know what this problen could be ?
I have left the external hard drive in during the night, and after the macbook goes to sleep, I will go back to it in the morning, and the hard drive has been unmounted, and I repeat the exercise over again of trying to mount the drive.
Its so annoying, and I just dont know wht to do.
If anyone can help, I;d really appreciate it.
Griff

SMART status is a pretty reliable indicator of what is going on. You should back up your irreplaceable files as soon as possible.

Two hard drive icons on my desktop, would like to have only one...

Hello everyone, I recently got a PowerMac G5 (I think it's a 2.3 GHz). It came with a hard drive inserted 'Untitled', which came from my old 1.6 GHz G5. On the desktop though, I get two hard drive icons, my main start up drive called 'Untitled', and another one called 'Spare'. I was told that my G5 has only one drive inserted 'Untitled', so I'm trying to either get rid of 'Spare', or merge it somehow into 'Untitled'. Under the Volumes folder, I was not really able to get rid of it, is this something to do with Disk Utility?
BDAqua - under Get Info, when I was on Leopard, I tried changing a User Permissions category called 'Everybody' from Read Only to Read and Write. Upon restart two days later, Leopard would not start up (loads of writing on the screen, with the Mac power button, asking me to restart). To cut a long story, I am now back on Tiger lol (Leopard issues for another discussion lol), so now I dare not play with anything which says Read Only, especially when it's probably not even necessary. I am writing this from the library, so don't know what exactly it says in Get Info - User Permissions for either drive at the moment. If this is relevant, I can have a look later and post back, I'll also verify permissions in Disk Utility for both drives, but I think they are fine. Actually, when I was on Leopard, my 'Untitled' drive took ages to verify permissions, and always loads of writing appeared! Now that I'm on Tiger, the other day when I verified Disk Permissions, it was quick and fine!
Thank you
In the screen shots, 'Untitled' is model ST31, 'Spare' is model WDC

Hi BDAqua, sorry I should have just opened it in the first place! I don't know why that man told me there was only one hard drive inside, perhaps a misunderstanding.
It seems that there are actually two hard drives inside, one in A, and one in B (see photo)! So, if this is the case, I don't have a problem with the two hard drive icons.
I guess if a G5 shows two hard drives on the desktop, then there's two hard drives in the machine!
Thanks for helping anyway.

What are all the hard drive icons on my desktop from app installations?

Most of the apps I have installed leave a new hard drive icon on my desktop, like these. Obviously the Macintosh HD is an good one to keep, but the others just keep accumulating and I find that to be a problem.
What are these?
What purpose do they serve?
Can I delete them?
If no delete, can I hide them?
Thanks

1. Mounted disk images.
2. They contain the software or its installer. The dmg format doesn't require separately storing the decompressed version of the data on the computer.
3. Yes.
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Problem getting hard drives to mount on desktop and also open when they do

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