[SOLVED]failure to mount external usb drive, possible hardware malfu

Please excuse me for posting this in the Arch forums, but I'd appreciate at least a point in the right direction. Every Google hit I came up with had a dubious solution like "reinstall USB drivers". I've never had an external drive fail on me yet, and I think this might be a sign of one. I recently moved and set up a 750gb WD external drive connected to this laptop running Arch and WinXP. Drive was working fine until this morning. I see it's entry in Thunar, but when I try to mount it:
Failed to mount "xxx".
WARNING: Couldn't set locale to 'en_PH.utf8' thus some file names may not
be correct or visible. Please see the potential solution at
http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#locale
Error opening '/dev/sdb1': Permission denied
Failed to mount '/dev/sdb1': Permission denied
Please check '/dev/sdb1' and the ntfs-3g binary permissions,
and the mounting user ID. More explanation is provided at
http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#unprivileged.
I got an entirely different error msg in Arch before, suggesting a chkdsk but I don't remember beyond that.
In Windows, I get USB device not recognized. I've tried turning the thing off and back on, making sure it's connected and swiping cables, rebooting Arch, nothing. Is it fried? Also, how does one even run a chkdsk on a drive that can't be mounted in Windows?
Thanks for the assistance.
Last edited by elephantos (2008-07-11 04:59:28)

Thunar is saying it's a permission problem... have you tried manually mounting it?

Similar Messages

Cannot mount external USB drive with FDisk_partition_scheme

Due to some recent mac issues in my lab, we updated one of the computers to Maverick 10.9.4 from Snow Leopard 10.6.8 yesterday. Anyhow, this seems to have erased the ability of the mac to read or mount several identical USB drives with the NTFS format (WD My Passport Ultra 500GB USB3.0). It could do it yesterday when it was OSX 10.6.8, but not today (OSX 10.9.4). The drives still work fine on other OSX 10.6.8, Windows 8.1 and Ubuntu 14.04 computers (this is appears to be a problem with the Maverick 10.9.4 operating system itself, rather than the flash drives which work flawlessly with every other computer I've tried). I want to remove data from the computer to create backups on the USB drives (no, I don't want to create an online backup or buy a new set of USB drives).
diskutil can see the drives, but cannot verify or repair them as they lack a GUID (GPT) partition scheme. I'm assuming this is the root of the problem. Manually mounting the drives does not work. Installing the ntfs-3g driver also did not work (I was using this to write to the NTFS drives until we upgraded OS's). Installing the WD Passport drivers for OSX also did not work. How do I get the mac to mount these drives?
I could reformat one USB drive and then copy to the others, but this would be extremely inconvenient and take days of copying files back and forth (and would prefer to fix the mac rather than go through this with every NTFS drive I own). If I did this, the FAT32 hard drive format would not be suitable, as format is unable to handle the extremely large sequencing datasets I need to transfer. I'm not super familiar with hard drive formats, but in the event we cannot get Maverick to actually work could someone possibly suggest a format able to handle large file sizes (the largest file I need to move is ~60GB) and be compatible with Windows 8.1 / OSX 10.9.4 / Ubuntu 14.04 as well?
Another workaround I thought of would be just to install an Ubuntu partition on the mac and get the files off through the Linux install. Which is also inconvenient, but would probably be faster than trying to reformat the drives and copy everything over onto them again given the amount of data I want to transfer.
Unrelated, but is there any way to view files and folders in the OSX root directory besides through Terminal? It seems like this functionality was also removed when we "upgraded" from Snow Leopard. (At this point, if it were up to me I would wipe all of the macs we own and replace them with Ubuntu... even the most minor of tasks always require some sort of workaround with them... at my wits end here ).

Yeah this definitely appears to be a problem specifically with this mac. It's been having all sorts of weird problems lately, and we figured that upgrading to Maverick might fix them (but instead we got new problems).
To give an update on this, I ended up reformatting one of the drives to HFS+ and disabled journaling. It now recognizes the drive again, and I'm pulling the files off that way. I looked at exFAT, but it looks like HFS+ has much better Linux support (Windows is read-only but that's only a minor annoyance, as the algorithms to process the data only run on UNIX machines anyways). It's a shame I couldn't keep using NTFS (had to copy over literally EVERYTHING again...) but whatever. Again, no solution for the issue (where this mac can't read NTFS drives).
@rkaufmann87 - To give a bit more explanation, we recently had to disable online backups because apparently the sheer amount of data causes Time Machine to freeze the computer and fail every time it has a scheduled backup (original issue we thought that upgrading to Maverick would solve... didn't work). The hard drive has been having a lot of issues when it begins to reach max capacity as well. So I am pulling off all of my files to external hard drives and deleting the local copy before we attempt to back up online again. And the data would probably take me a year and a lot of money to recreate (for the curious, it's high throughput sequencing data). I'm choosing not to take any chances as a result.

Cannot mount external USB drive

During a recent update I remember pacman asking about replacing some package with another package to handle disk mounting. I think the added package was "gnome-volume-manager" or "gnome-disk-utility" (or both). I didn't see any postings describing problems with doing this, so went ahead and allowed the change. Now it's a few days later and I find I cannot mount an external USB hard drive anymore. It has an entry in fstab, and although I have tried mutiple edits of the device to associate the drive with, nothing works.
The disk used to associate with /dev/sdb1. Now this device no longer exists. Here is what has happened to my /dev/sd* entries:
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 0 2009-10-27 11:08 /dev/sda
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 3 2009-10-27 11:08 /dev/sda3
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 1 2009-10-27 11:08 /dev/sda1
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 2 2009-10-27 11:08 /dev/sda2
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 4 2009-10-27 11:08 /dev/sda4
brw-rw---- 1 root storage 8, 16 2009-11-04 13:00 /dev/sdb
Trying to force association with "/dev/sdb" "/dev/sda5" (or some other number not in use) or "sdb1" (or 2,3,4, whatever) just yields "special device ... does not exist".
Does anybody know how to deal with this?
Does anybody know what package(s) I replaced when the update in question took place? I think I'd like to reverse whatever happened.
And on another note, I think another gnome-based package also recently replaced a package relating to printing. Yesterday I discovered I have printing problems too:
At first there were no printers found. Although cups is supposed to start according to rc.conf, cupsd was not running. I started it manually and then all the printers showed up again, though I cannot print duplex (again, worked fine before). What is going on with these gnome packages?!? Anyone know which package(s) I need to remove (and then what to put back) to make printing work like it used to also?
thanks much.

oddly, fdisk -l shows nothing, even for disks which are mounted (eg. /dev/sda4). when I insert a standard USB thumb drive, the following show up properly:
brw-rw---- 1 root storage 8, 32 2009-11-05 10:50 /dev/sdc
brw-rw---- 1 root storage 8, 33 2009-11-05 10:50 /dev/sdc1
and I am able to mount and use the drive as usual.
The external drive I've been struggling with has xfs for filesystem type. After using the thumb drive, /dev/sdb showed up spontaneously, but no /dev/sdb1. attempting to mount gives:
mount: /dev/sdb is not a valid block device
or
mount: special device /dev/sdb1 does not exist
depending on which device is specified in fstab.
I am thinking that either a) my ability to mount xfs filesystems has somehow been hosed, or b) there is something wrong with drive, which must have spontaneously failed very recently (it is less than 1 yr old, but this happens from time to time).
If the drive is okay, any ideas about how mounting xfs filesystems could have been broken by recent upgrades?
btw, the fstab entry (which worked fine until a couple days ago) is: /dev/sdb1 /mnt/external_1 xfs rw,noauto,user,exec 0 0

[Solved] Read-Only mounting of USB drives

Hello all,
This issue has been raised in many threads, but still I am unable to sort it out!
My USB drives (pen drive/ Hard Disk) are always mounted in read-only mode. These are in VFAT filesystem, so I dont think ntfs-3g is needed. But I installed that anyways.
I also tried with disabling auto mounting in dconf-editor and keeping a rule file under /etc/udev/rules.d/ as mentioned in the wiki.
Still no luck.
Any ideas ?
Thanks!
Last edited by gagan_mishra (2012-03-03 19:11:09)

This is the output :
/dev/sda1 on /media/2004CEA904CE80F0 type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,blksize=4096)
/dev/sdc1 on /media/ARCH_201108 type udf (ro,nosuid,nodev,relatime,uid=1000,gid=100,umask=77,iocharset=utf8,uhelper=udisks)
Here /dev/sdc1 is the USB drive. As you can see, its mounted as 'ro' (read only).
Thanks!

Terminal/Unix Command to Mount External USB Drive?

I am having a probelm with the directory on an external HDD. The "device" is showing up in the utility software (DRIVE GENIUS/DISK UTILITY) but not the "volume," so it can't affect any repairs except INTIALIZE. So, I'm presuming the drive is physically okay - just the directory is fouled up. Is there some unix command to run that will repair the directory in some manner? Thanks!

Hi Metroxing,
   What you presume is not a given but yes, the existence of the device file greatly decreases the relative probability of your having a hardware problem. However, I have a question. I'm not sure of what you mean by the term "directory".
   In "UNIX" jargon a directory is that which in "Mac" jargon would be a filesystem "folder". However, there is another data structure in the filesystem that I think is called a "directory". I assume that's simply an abstraction of the Catalog B-Tree and related files. I know about this use of the term "directory" from discussions and readings on Alsoft's DiskWarrior. That is supposed to do exactly what you want, "rebuild the directory structure", and is a relatively inexpensive "best-of-breed" solution.
Gary
~~~~
   Imitation is the sincerest form of television.
         -- Fred Allen

External USB drive won't mount after 10.9.5 upgrade

Is anyone else reporting the following issue? Immediately after installing OS X update 10.9.5 (13F34) on 09/18, my external USB drive (IOMega 1GB OS X Extended FS) used for Time Machine would no longer mount and isn't recognized. When I look at the drives in finder, it is missing. However, it does show up under the USB Hi-Speed Bus device tree:
USB Mass Storage:
Product ID:    0x0376
Vendor ID:    0x059b (Iomega Corporation)
Version:     0.00
Serial Number:    ABCDEF012314E2ED
Speed:    Up to 480 Mb/sec
Manufacturer:    Iomega
Location ID:    0x1a120000 / 3
Current Available (mA):    500
Current Required (mA):    0
Console message when device plugged in:
10/6/14 3:22:31.000 AM kernel[0]: USBMSC Identifier (non-unique): ABCDEF012314E2ED 0x59b 0x376 0x0, 2
mount command results:
devfs on /dev (devfs, local, nobrowse)
map -hosts on /net (autofs, nosuid, automounted, nobrowse)
map auto_home on /home (autofs, automounted, nobrowse)
/dev/disk1s2 on /Volumes/Mac-Mini 2 (hfs, local, nodev, nosuid, noowners)
System is Mac-Mini (late 2012), 2.5 Ghz i5, 8GB ram, 500GB local storage, 1TB on second Firewire disk for media, 1TB USB disk for Firewire (PROBLEM)
I have reinstalled the combined 10.9.5 OS upgrade, and verified that the drive works when connected to my other MB Pro (mid-2012 running Yosemite beta 3). There is no third party software that I'm aware of in use for this drive, as it's only for Time Machine backups.
Thanks

Is the drive's icon on the desktop (perhaps behind another icon, which is possible if Finder > View > Cleanup is enabled)?
If not, is the box Finder > Preferences > General > External Disks checked?
Is the drive listed in every Finder window's sidebar?
If not, is the box Finder > Preferences > Sidebar > External Disks checked?
Are Time Machine backups to the drive happening on schedule?
If not, does the drive appear in System Preferences > Time Machine > Select Disk?
Can you open /Volumes/Mac-Mini 2/Backups.backupdb using Finder > Go > Go to Folder...?
Does the drive appear in Disk Utility? Is it (or can it be) mounted there?
Have you tried to plug it in to a USB port on the Mini (not a hub) or into a different USB port on the Mini?
Have you tried this: shut down; unplug the drive; boot the Mac; after you have logged in and the Finder is done populating the desktop and menu bar, plug the drive in?

Single-user mode: How to mount and access an external USB drive?

My MacBook Pro HD is acting up. Cannot boot normally or into "safe mode". Cannot reinstall OS without wiping out the HD. Need to recover some critical files but DiskUtil First Aid and Restore options cannot successfully complete. Problem traced down to "invalid node structure" which means I either have a hardware problem or my filesystem partition directory structure is corrupted. I need to recover some files that are not backed up (timin issue with my regular backup process).
I can boot into single-user mode, mount the root file system (/sbin/mount -uw /) and can see/navigate the rot filesystem structure via good UNIX command line. Here's what I would like to do (in single-user mode):
1. Mount an external USB drive (250 GB already formatted as Mac OS X Extended)
2. Copy various files and/or directories from my HD to the external USB drive (UNIX cp command)
I realize I could go spend $$ for the Disk Warrior or Data Rescue products (or something similar) that SHOULD help me recover my HD or files, but it seems silly to do this when I can see, touch and taste them from within single-user mode....
Comments? Suggestions?
TIA --
Trent
P.S. Once I've recovered my files, I'll try to reformat the HD and then reinstall the OS. And THEN go have Apple look at my machine (thank goodness for AppleCare coverage)!

Resolution:
1) Boot system in single-user mode (SUM) with external HD attached.
2) Execute the following UNIX CLI commands once SUM boot process is completed:
# fsck -fy
# mount -uw /
# mkdir /Volumes/target_directory
# mount -t hfs -w /dev/diskXXX /Volumes/target_directory
# cp -RXv /source_directory /Volumes/target_directory
Where XXX is the device-level name for your external HD's data partition. In my case this was /dev/disk1s2. It may take some experimentation to identify this device name if your system has multiple HD's.
3) Verify contents were successfully copied onto the /Volumes/target_directory.
Comments and observations:
- Do NOT use "/" as your source directory - cp will make a second (redundant) copy of /volumes/target_directory
- I was able to successfully copy ALL files off my HD despite the fsck command's "invalid node structure" error message with this simple procedure. YMMV, depending on the state of your HD.
- The repeated disk0s2: I/O error warnings displayed during the SUM boot process did not seem to have a negative effect on this procedure. I also received this same error warning intermittently as I navigated the mounted filesystem did not seem to be a problem, either. Again, YMMV.
Commercial software:
I downloaded ProSoft Engineering's Data Rescue 3 product (trial version) before spending $99 to attempt to recover my "bad" HD's data via mounting to a good system with FW target mode. It could not successfully complete its "QuickScan" process and immediately hung on block 0 of 390M during its "Deep Scan" process. The product did seem to function properly on an operational system. ProSoft's technical support was responsive and helpful but had no answer for my "Deep Scan" error.
I did not attempt to use Alsoft's Disk Warrior 4 product. I could not find any trial software available and was reluctant to spend $100 based upon the mixed reviews and comments on this discussion forum as well as other reviews. Alsoft does claim to address the "invalid node structure" error in their marketing materials. Hindsight being 20/20 - I saved $100 by using this simple procedure.
Final note:
Neither Leopard nor Snow Leopard's installation DVD could recognize the bad internal HD when trying to do a reinstall. While DiskUtil was able to "see" the bad internal drive it immediately failed when I tried to do an "erase and format". Took the system to my local Apple store and the Genius ran a tool called "SMART Utility" from Volitans Software (www.volitans-software.com). SMART utility confirmed that my HD was bad so it was replaced. AppleCare pays for itself (once again!).

OS refuses to mount external USB flash drive. Says a piece of OS software is missing.

OS refuses to mount external USB flash drive. Says a piece of OS software is missing. The flash drive (thumb drive) usually lights up but does not go through the flashing on/off that was tyjpical when first inserting it.
I tried an external hard drive and got the same results; that is, no result, as if it wasn't connected. No icon appears on the desktop and no device shows up in the sidebar. It (10.6.8, Mac Pro Duo) had worked perfectly before this, of course.

Hmmmmm,,,,
Disconnected all peripherals. Did a Safe Mode startup and that worked fine. Very limited features, of course.
Started up with the Snow Leopart (10.6.3) disk. Used disk utility to verify permissions and ran disk repair on all three internal HDs. No repairs needed.
Ran Drive Genius and did the same things, as a double-check.
Plugged in the flash drive (thumb drive) and it came up fine (still operating the OS from the Sno-Leop disk).
I wanted to re-start with the disk and bring up the Apple Hardware Test as you suggested. I had lots of kernal panics on a previous machine, a G4 desktop, and has used that at that time (with a 10.2 or 10.4 disk). thought I remembered that you hold the D key down when starting up from the disk and it would open the hardware test, but either I remember wrong or it works different in 10.6 because it was just a normal startup.
How do I get to the Hardware Test on the 10.6 Snow Leopard disk?
Restarted without the disk and the Mac Pro desktop still showed the gray screen with what Apple calls the "prohibitory" sign, the circle with the diagonal line in it.
I decided to load the OS disk onto HD 3 and designate that as the startup disk, which I did and it works fine. The USB flash drive loads properly, opens, etc. just as it should. I haven't yet plugged in the peripherals (scanner, printer, second DVD/CD recorder, tablet, an external drive, or connected to ethernet yet. Will do those one at a time and see if any of them casued a problem.)
Am I right in thinking:
A) HD One might have bad sections. I didn't defrag with Drive Genius (26% fragged) or look for bad blocks, which I'll probably do tonight.
or B) the OS has been slightly corrupted and may need reloading
or C) I have a virus or conflict (though I haven't added anything new lately). I do have the ButtonManager loading problem for Mac. which is talked about on MacRumors site, etc. but the timing of its appearance and this problem don't match.
Apologies for being so wordy; want to get all information that may be helpful. I appreciate your interest.

External USB drives will not mount under Mountain Lion

Since upgrading to Mountain Lion, two external USB2 drives that I have will not mount and cannot be viewed in the Finder. The same occurs on a 2012 MacBook Air, a 2009 iMac 27 and a 2010 MacMini, all running OS X Mountain Lion version 10.8.2.
Both drives are Samsung Story external USB drives (one is 1.5 GB and the other is 2 GB) and both have been formatted using Mac Disk Utility with a single Mac OS Extended (Journaled) partition, one using Snow Leopard and the other with Lion.
Both still mount correctly on a friends MacBook Pro that is still running Snow Leopard, and I had no problem with the same drives under Lion. Interestingly both can also be connected to Time Capsule USB port and show up correctly.
Both drives mount correctly under Windows 7 on BootCamp partitions that I have on both the 2012 MacBook Air, a 2009 iMac 27. These BootCamp partitions have Paragon HFS+ installed so I can read Mac formated drives.
Both drives show up in Disk Utility, but when attempt to mount the drives I get the message "The disk could not be mounted. Try running First Aid on the disk and retry mounting." I can run Repair in First Aid on the disk and get the message that the volume appears OK, but again have the same problem when I attempt to mount the disk.
I have also tried using Disk Utility 3,2, but still cannot mount the drives, though the program indicates there is no problem with the drives.
I have other portable USB including a Samsung portable USB2 drive, and two external USB3 drives, and I don't have problems with them.
There is clearly a problem with Mountain Lion with accessing (mounting) these Samsung Story USB drives, and the problem appears to be with Mountain Lion itself as the problem did not occur on the same Macs with Lion and does not occur with Bootcamp partitions on the machines.
I have a lot of time searching forums, but I have not found anyone with an identical problem.
I sure hope someone can help or that Apple come up with a fix for this issue which has only developed since the update to Mountain Lion.

bj10au wrote:
Since upgrading to Mountain Lion, two external USB2 drives that I have will not mount and cannot be viewed in the Finder. The same occurs on a 2012 MacBook Air, a 2009 iMac 27 and a 2010 MacMini, all running OS X Mountain Lion version 10.8.2.
Both drives are Samsung Story external USB drives (one is 1.5 GB and the other is 2 GB) and both have been formatted using Mac Disk Utility with a single Mac OS Extended (Journaled) partition, one using Snow Leopard and the other with Lion.
Both still mount correctly on a friends MacBook Pro that is still running Snow Leopard, and I had no problem with the same drives under Lion. Interestingly both can also be connected to Time Capsule USB port and show up correctly.
Both drives mount correctly under Windows 7 on BootCamp partitions that I have on both the 2012 MacBook Air, a 2009 iMac 27. These BootCamp partitions have Paragon HFS+ installed so I can read Mac formated drives.
Both drives show up in Disk Utility, but when attempt to mount the drives I get the message "The disk could not be mounted. Try running First Aid on the disk and retry mounting." I can run Repair in First Aid on the disk and get the message that the volume appears OK, but again have the same problem when I attempt to mount the disk.
I have also tried using Disk Utility 3,2, but still cannot mount the drives, though the program indicates there is no problem with the drives.
I have other portable USB including a Samsung portable USB2 drive, and two external USB3 drives, and I don't have problems with them.
There is clearly a problem with Mountain Lion with accessing (mounting) these Samsung Story USB drives, and the problem appears to be with Mountain Lion itself as the problem did not occur on the same Macs with Lion and does not occur with Bootcamp partitions on the machines.
I have a lot of time searching forums, but I have not found anyone with an identical problem.
I sure hope someone can help or that Apple come up with a fix for this issue which has only developed since the update to Mountain Lion.
You can start here
http://support.seagate.com/kbimg/flash/213059/213059_EN.HTML
Pete

[SOLVED] Problem with external USB drive started yesterday

My system freezes for about 65 seconds at the login screen. After 65 seconds, I can login and everything is normal afterwards.
I discovered that I can eliminate the freeze by disconnecting the external USB drive from the PC. Here are the error messages from kernel.log when the drive is connected:
Oct 15 23:10:14 localhost kernel: [ 17.035091] usb 1-1.3: device descriptor read/64, error -110
Oct 15 23:10:29 localhost kernel: [ 32.155955] usb 1-1.3: device descriptor read/64, error -110
Oct 15 23:10:29 localhost kernel: [ 32.325394] usb 1-1.3: new high speed USB device number 4 using ehci_hcd
Oct 15 23:10:31 localhost kernel: [ 34.045126] MediaState is connected
There is supposed to be a kernel boot option (irqpoll) to prevent this from occurring. However, that option seems to no longer work for kernels after 2.6.39. If I try using it with Arch, the system will not boot, saying all the CPU's failed.
I also don't understand why this just started happening yesterday, as the USB drive has been connected to the PC longer than I've been using Arch. Also, my kernel has not been updated since I installed Arch on Oct 8.
Does anyone know another fix or workaround for this problem?
Thanks,
Tim
Last edited by ratcheer (2011-10-17 01:30:08)

Problem solved
I feel stupid, but I also feel better. I turned off the PC, disconnected the power from the USB drive for about 15 seconds, reconnected the power, rebooted, removed the irqpoll kernel option, and Ubuntu started, perfectly. I need to learn that the USB drive just goes freaky sometimes and remember to do this. But, this is only the second time I've had to do this in months of use.
Tim

Automator to mount multiple ISO files on external USB drives

I have several ISO files on an external USB drive on a Mac mini. Double clicking on any of the ISO mounts it, one at a time.
I need to have an automator that mounts ALL ISO it can see on a given USB external drive. I have written an Apple script but that hangs up the Mac mini. I need help because I am not familiar with Applescript or Apple automator. I used Unix years ago, butg have a hard time with AppleScript.

Macs can't normally write to NTFS drives:
http://discussions.apple.com/click.jspa?searchID=7426620&messageID=4582486
Your other problem sounds like another computer has the files open or application has the files open simultaneously. Try shutting down your Mac, and isolating your Mac from any network and try rebooting again in safe mode by holding the shift key at startup.

Is it possible to format an external USB drive with XFS or EXT3 ?

Greetings all.
I am running a 2,8Ghz 8x core with 6Gb ram. I have a NAS, (Buffalo Pro Duo Linkstation) which has a built in linux which saves data using XFS (I think). It has a built in backup routine, but the drive it backs up to MUST be in XFS or EXT3 (Fat 32 works but it drops all files over 2GB ;( ... ) So - here's my question:
How can I format the external USB drive (A seagate freeagent) in XFS or EXT3 so that it can run on my Buffalo? My preference is to use a GUI mac program (does one exist?) or to use a command line UNIX command (FSK? - but then, how????). I could also use (GASP!) a windows utility on parallels, or even install a linux distro via parallels. But it should be easy I hope...
Looking forward to any ideas/thoughts, tips, etc.
thanks and best to all from Berlin,
Jason

Download a "Live CD" (one you can boot of into running copy of Linux without having to install anything; for example, [OpenSUSE Live CD|http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.0/iso/cd/openSUSE-11.0-GNOME-Li veCD-x86_64.iso]).
Use OS X' Disk Utility to burn it to a CD.
Insert the CD you just burned (if it ejected afterwards), and then restart your Mac.
Hold down the 'C' key on the keyboard as the Mac boots, and it should switch to booting off the CD. Once the CD starts loading, you can let go. It will take a couple of minutes, but it will eventually boot into Linux.
Attach your USB drive.
Run gparted (you need to search the menus for it, it's under system administration, I think -- or you can open up a terminal window and simply type 'gparted').
Find your disk (/dev/sdb or /dev/sda) and partition and format it using the filesystem you want.
When done, restart the computer. You'll boot back into Mac OS X and have an EXT2/EXT3/XFS formatted external drive (that OS X won't recognize, by the way).

TimeMachine wearing out external USB drives??

I have noticed an issue with external USB drives connected to my iMac. I have been using one as a TimeMachine target and have had to replace three of them over the past two years as they eventually fail and no longer mount. I am not sure if it is an issue with TimeMachine or not, but I have noticed that the USB drive seems to spin up every 15 minutes even if there isn't a backup scheduled, which could be wearing it out prematurely. Once the iMac goes to sleep the drive does not spin up. My third drive started whining a few days back and Disk Utility will no longer repair the drive. Anyone with a similar issue?

Hiya mem16421,
this is definitely related to timemachine. the following could solve your issue:
{quote: wrote:}{quote}I spoke to apple about it today and they suggested the > following course of action:
1. disable time machine
2. delete the spotlight index on the external drive
3. allow spotlight to rebuild the index
4. re-activate time machine
The above is from another forum and pertains to 10.5.x. And it shows a console entry that might look familiar to yours. Maybe the failure is due to TM trying to write permanently to an incorrectly formatted drive or a drive that wants to "go to sleep"? (hence my previous comment).

I would like to recover my bookmarks from my old hard drive that I now have as an external USB drive. The old OS was Vista; the new is Windows 7.

I recently had a new hard drive installed on my laptop; this hard drive has the Windows 7 OS on it.
At the same time, I had my old hard drive mounted in an SATB enclosure so that I could use it as an external USB drive. [I stupidly did not export my bookmarks before doing all of this]
Everything seems to work fine [I can see all of the files], but I cannot find out where my bookmarks are stored on the old hard drive.
Is it possible to find them and get them transferred over to the new hard drive??
Thanks!!

Bookmarks are stored in a file called places.sqlite inside the profile folder. You can copy that file from the old profile folder into your current profile folder. For details of how to find the profile folder see https://support.mozilla.com/kb/Profiles or http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Firefox
You can recover more than just the bookmarks - https://support.mozilla.com/kb/Recovering+important+data+from+an+old+profile

No application runs after booting from an external (USB) drive

Hi all,
my best hope is that I just embarrass myself with a blatantly obvious question instead of finding a real issue that will be resolved only in later updates. Here it is:
As I want to upgrade my hard drive in my good ol' MacBook, I wanted to backup my present boot HDD to an external USB drive (freshly formatted, HFS+ journaled, GUID partition table). I tried both SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner. In both cases, the backup/cloning process goes fine, and I can reboot into the external drive, and the OS starts (yes, with wifi working, even iStat menus, textExpander etc. initiating fine). But all applications (not those on the menu bar, though) crash and notify me of some thread having tried some invalid operation, or sometimes I even got some vague reference to kernel protection.
Do you have any ideas what this is? Something new and (supposedly) secure in 10.5.6? I tried a fairly standard procedure, I think. (Also, it is a fairly pressing issue as I would not really want to waste much more time on this drive swap. And I would rather use disk-cloning than the install disk and sucking back data from an apparently unreliable backup.)
Many thanks for any thoughts!
(Just to inform the interested, I ran a fairly extensive cleaning-maintenance-rebuild cycle by the latest Onyx before starting all this, this should clean up the state of the OS pretty much. But I could not run DiskWarrior. Convince me if you think that this would solve the problem.)

Thanks Devin, I think my issue is a bit different.
I am 'long' past the 10.5.6 update (as long as possible), it did not crash, and Software Update checked what it wanted several times since then (as it is set to do so daily).
Thanks for the safe boot tip, I have not tried it yet, though I am skeptical why would this help applications starting up without breaking some kernel protection -- but only if I booted up from an external drive.
I repaired all I could before the cloning of the drive, only the deep maintenance of DiskWarrior was skipped. With the disk or the OS itself, I basically did what you can, even the stuff that you are rarely supposed to do. (Onyx is a great tool to do all these and more, freely.)
I am not sure either that a FireWire drive would have helped, but who knows. (But really, the OS would boot, just the applications would feel that their are on an 'inferior' drive?) In any case, FireWire drives are not that easy to come by, and a risky investment -- e.g. I could not use them with the new MacBooks. Oh, and all my work was done on a firm table, but again, the behavior would be hard to explain as the HDD misbehaving, as the OS had no glitch, just I could not start applications without their crashing immediately.
Thanks again, I hope I run into something useful or if it is a bug then Apple magically pushes out some update before their winter break, or I will sadly watch my precious new drive sitting on a table idly.

[SOLVED]failure to mount external usb drive, possible hardware malfu

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