Two FW800 drives refuse to mount

First sudden Time Machine difficulty with the drives' Read Only status (which is a new issue). Now hours later the drives won't consistently mount.
I've tried zapping PRAM, Permissions Repair (off the internal, and the OS X disc).
Any ideas?

Ah, nevermind. A run of DiskWarrior fixed all issues. I had not been in the habit of DiskWarrioring the TM drives - emphasis on had not.

Similar Messages

Mac Mini 2009 - Can't daisy chain two FW800 drives

I have two FW800 enclosures with 3.5-inch drives and external power.
Each one mounts individually when connected to the Mini FW800 port but when I daisy-chain them the second one in the chain doesn't mount and is not seen by disk utility.
Those enclosures use an Oxford UF934DSB chipset.
What's ironic that I had a FW400 enclosure daisy chained to one FW800 enclosure until this afternoon and that daisy-chain worked fine.
Somewhere on the net there was an article that the daisy-chaining had to be done in a certain sequence, ie Mac FW to top FW port on first external, then from bottom of first FW enclosure to top of second and so forth.
I always though the FW ports were just wired in parallel.
Well, this is interesting - since these new FW800 enclosures also have one FW400 port as well, I just connected the second one using the FW400 ports and now they both mount.
But now the whole chain only runs at FW400 speeds.
Anyone else come across this problem or better yet, what is the solution to get both daisy-chained FW800 drives to mount.
The enclosures are Rosewell, the drive in each a 1.5 TB WD green.

I don't think it has anything to do with the power supply.
The two enclosures are identical and react (work or not) exactly the same when I interchange them or the FW cable.
They also work flawlessly if I connect the second one using FW400 instead of FW800. Would just trying to get the enclosure to mount with FW800 draw more current than when mounting with FW400 to put the power brick over the edge? I doubt it.
A few other things I'm going to try - I do this when I have a few extra minutes since I can't afford to spend my time on this continuously.
1. See if there is a F'W update for the enclosure and/or the Oxford chip.
2. Talk to the Oxford and enclosure support people
3. Update to 10.6.4, I'm on 10.6.2 right now
4. Do a bit more digging on the net to see how others got the FW800 daisy-chaining working.
The two enclosures react the same when I try each one separately and also when I switch them around. Whatever the problem is, it affects both equally so it's not some defect on one of them.
With the rest of the testing I have done, I'm now pretty sure it's a Mac software problem.
Although I would have thought someone else would have this problem as well but I can't even find any discussion on daisy-chaining with this chipset when running OS 10.6.
There is a 15-digit number in disk utility called connection ID.
I assume that is the Firewire ID number that some threads I read refer to.
That ID is the same for the two FW800 ports and the FW400 port on each enclosure but it's different for the two enclosures, so some conflict there is definitely not the issue.
So far I couldn't find what the latest issue of firmware is for the Oxford chip set, but I copied all the information that comes up with the firewire hardware listing so when I find the information I can check it against the firmware issue on my two units.
Now, another interesting tidbit - some people say they had to power up the enclosure a few times occasionally to get a single drive to mount.
I never had that problem, a single FW800 drive always mounted right away, but I decided to try that with the daisy-chained drive.
So I turned the power switch on that second drive off and then on again...and lo and behold - doesn't it mount now........
But that is not the interesting tidbit........the tidbit is when I check back in the Mini Firewire hardware listing.
Whereas before it showed all the expected detail with either drive when connected individually via FW800, now with both FW800 drives connected I get this:
*FireWire Bus:*
*Warning: Unable to list FireWire devices.*
*Maximum Speed: Up to 800 Mb/sec*
....and oooops - both FW800 drives just disconnected by themselves.
Sure seems to point to a Mac software issue.
And if you google for "Warning: Unable to list FireWire devices." you get pages of hits - many on Leopard but also a fair share on SL.
I updated the software to 10.6.4 - still the same problem.
Daisy-chain with FW400 is fine, with FW800 the second drive in the chain - doesn't matter which one it is, won't mount.

Two external FW drives - Can't mount both at same time?

Hi, I just got two new 200 GB ATA drives and I've installed them in two separate cases. I have managed to get both drives formatted and mounted, but only one at a time. If I have one drive switched on and mounted, as soon as I switch the other one on, the system hangs and I get the beach ball. If I then switch off the drive I just put on, things return to normal. If I unmount the first drive and switch it off and then turn on the second drive it mounts normally.
I have another FW drive with a different type of controller in its case (Oxford Semiconductor Ltd). I can mount that no problem and then mount either of the two new drives. The only thing I can't get to work is the the two new drives in their cases made by the same manufacturer. System Profiler says that the external cases contain Prolific PL3507 Combo devices.
I have tried every way of connecting the drives - i.e. two cables one from each drive to each FW port on my computer and also daisy chaining the drives, but I still can't get the two new drives to mount together. If I use my old FW drive and one of the new ones, I have no problem getting them both to mount with two cables or daisy chained.
So I'm stuck now - any advice I can get here will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Powermac G4 MDD 1GHz DP Mac OS X (10.3.9) 2 GB RAM

Thanks Malcolm - Do you think it might be worth trying to flash the firmware on these cases - there seem to be updaters available on Prolific's website. Obviously I'd have to do it on a PC. I've emailed Prolific asking them about my problem. No reply as yet, and I'm not holding my breath! Do you know if there are any other posts on these boards relating to Prolific? Stupid question really - I'll just do a search...
Thanks again for your post. Cheers from Bonnie Scotland.

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.

Two new external FW drives won't mount at the same time

Hi
I've just purchased two 250Gb external FW hard drives for my eMac. I already have a 60Gb external FW hard drive.
I also purchased a 6-port Belkin FW hub to hook them all up.
I've been having problems getting the three drives to mount simultaneously.
Initially I thought the problem was with the hub, or the FW cables, but the cables are fine, and if I take the hub out of the equation, and just try to mount two drives using the eMac's two FW ports, I still have problems.
Either of the two new 250Gb drives will mount fine with the old 60Gb drive, but if I try to mount the two 250Gb drives simultaneously, only one will mount (which ever I plugged in first).
The only way to get both 250Gb drives mounted at the same time is to use FW for one and USB for the other (way too slow).
The 250Gb drives are Hitachi Deskstars in enclosures with the Oxford chipset.
I've searched the internet for answers, but haven't found much, except, maybe, for this comment:
'While this cannot solve all FireWire issues, I've spent a lot of time debugging multiple FireWire enclosures on the same computer. Apparently there is a unique hardware ID (similar to a MAC address in an Ethernet card) that some manufacturers are not making unique. Any time you have two or more drives with the same ID, you'll have problems.'
Any ideas?
Thank you.

FWIW, I've tried to mount both drives on a friend's iBook, and the problem remains the same: it's one drive, or the other - both drives will not mount simultaneously.
I updated to 10.3.9, but that hasn't fixed anything.
Any ideas?

External Firewire drive does not mount on desktop now.

Greetings everyone.
G5 dual, 4.6GB ram, OSX 10.4.10, external firewire drive, formerly worked fine, now is invisible.
Not the drive. New purchase, worked fine until a restart. Not the cable. Power is getting from the G5 to the firewire drive. Not the port. I also have a firewire card instlaled so I have three ports to connect it to (and two on the FW drive). No combination works. Not the computer, the FW drive also fails to appear on an iBook. Not the OS. I did a clean install to make sure.
I'm not a newbie. I know what I'm doing. Until now! DiskWarrior, TechTool Pro, Drive Genius and Apple's Disk Utility cannot see the drive.
The FW drive is a Powerbook internal HD inserted into a case, purchased seperately.
At my wits' end. Can anyone help please.

I am suddenly having this EXACT problem. I have two Firelite firewire drives (one 60G and one 80G) that are suddenly refusing to mount on my older dual 1.25GHz G4 tower. They are also suddenly refusing to mount on my non-intel iMac. They will both mount painlessly on my new Intel MacBook Pro, but that's not much use, since the point of the firewire drives is to transfer files between these computers. I'm updating all of them to 10.4.10 to see if that's the issue...

External Drives Won't Mount with Mavericks

My external drives will not mount with Mavericks. They did for a while but I noticed that they stopped doing so a week ago or so. I have a drobo raid, hitiachi drive in an external case and a WD Passport. The drobo goes to sleep, the Hitachi external spins and the WD flashes like its being read.
None of the drives were mounted when I loaded Mavericks and, as far as I know, they've not been erased. They did mount for a few weeks but doesn't look they have since the beginning of November.
I have a brand new 2013 MBP 15" Retina with 750 GB SSHD, 16 GB ram and a 2.7 GHz i7. The drives are all connected via one FW800 through a Thunderbolt dongle.

I eventually gave up. I will probably get another card at some point but it probably won't be a SIIG card. Even though they are recommended by digidesign I just doesn't seem to want to work with my G5. Maybe it's some kind of weird software conflict blocking the functionality of the card? Don't know. Two cards in a row were non functional. Something is gummin up the works and the PCI slots work with the other cards I have. The only thing I did not try is plugging in the optional power connection to the FW800 card, which is supposed to be optional. I called SIIG and they had no idea what the problem was and they also said that the power plug would not make a difference for the problem I was having. Anyway, I'm gonna keep monitoring posts to this cause I'd love to hear the answer.. but I'm throwing in the towel. Good luck to the rest of you still trying to solve the riddle.

USB flash drive won't mount

I have a strange problem with a USB flash drive which refuses to mount on the desktop of my MDD FW800. It registers in System Profiler but not in Disk Utility. I can't get it to mount using Terminal either. The Terminal screen says it has mounted but it doesn't appear on the desktop and I can't access it. However, if I do a restart with the the drive plugged in, it does mount. If I eject it and then try to plug it in again, it won't mount! Very frustrating.
It works fine on my Powerbook and my Digital Audio so it can't be the drive itself that's the problem. Not quite sure when this started but it may have been after I installed a PCI USB2.0 card (a Ratoc Rex-PCIU3). The card itself works fine with other USB products and I don't have any deep sleep problems with it either. I'm stumped.
Any suggestions anyone?
Alex
G4 1.25GHz Dual MDD FW800; G4 Digital Audio; Powerbook 800MHz DVI Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Hello rickame
Click on the desktop then go up to the menu bar and select Finder / Finder Preferences / General and make sure the box's are checked for Hard disk, External disks, etc.. then reconnect the drive. If you still don't see it on the desktop it may have been improperly disconnected from the iMac while mounted, look to see if it show's up in Disk Utilities and the System Profiler on the USB bus. If you are plugging it into the keyboard, try one of the USB ports on the back of the iMac or a powered hub. There also could be a conflict with other USB devices, try ejecting and disconnect things like an iPod, a printer/scanner or camera, then restarting the iMac and connect only the Flash drive.
Dennis

Slave drive, CDs, USB drives, Disk Images and FW drives fail to mount

Hi. I have two Maxtor internal hard drives (6Y160P0 and 6Y120P0), the second of which (6Y120P0) all of a sudden will not mount on the desktop. When I reboot my Mac, I get two identical error windows that state, “The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer”, with options to initialize, ignore, or eject. (There are no other drives of any type connected to the computer).
Within Disk Utility (when run from the primary hard drive), the slave drive shows up, but its icon is dimmed. Clicking the “Mount” button does nothing. Disk First Aid does not allow one to “Repair Permissions” nor “Repair Disk”, presumably since it won’t mount (eg, these options are dimmed). One odd aspect about Disk Utility is that the master and slave drive are listed as “disk0s10” and “disk1s10”, respectively, rather than the way they usually show up with the names I’ve given them. Yet on the desktop the working master drive shows up with its given name.
When I run Disk Itility from a CD, both internal drives look fine, accept repairs, and the drives are listed by their proper names.
As another interesting clue, all of the Disk Images (stored on the working master internal hard drive) that I have attempted to mount fail to open as well. When I doubleclick them, I get an error that reads, “The following disk images failed to mount: Reason: No mountable file systems”.
Two different USB keychains fail to mount; my FW drive fails to mount.
I’ve run Applejack Auto Restart without any difficulty several times.
Apple's Hardware check CD says all is AOK.
I’ve rebuilt this problematic disk (and the master) several times with Disk Warrior 3.03 and all is supposedly AOK.
SmartReporter says both disks are fine.
TechTool Pro 4.1.2 has run the following checks on the problem disk and these are AOK: Disk Controller, SMART, Read/Write.
All of this makes me wonder if the issue is with my system software, rather than the slave disk??? Interestingly, CDs refuse to mount as well when I've booted from the primary hard drive (but I don't think it is the CD drive itself since I can boot from the CD drive). This, coupled with the fact that disk images won't mount, makes me now think it is an OS issue rather than hardware.
Any suggestions about what I can do to salvage and fix this problem would be greatly appreciated!
G4/867MHz running OS 10.4.8

If anyone else is having this problem, check out the totally awesome post by GNJ to my similar query on the MacFixIt forums:
Drives and Disk Images refuse to mount
http://www.macfixitforums.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=tiger&Number=791320&Forum= &Words=CharPatton&Match=Username&Searchpage=0&Limit=25&Old=6months&Main=791320&S earch=true#Post791320
His suggestion to run the 10.4.8 combined PPC update worked like a charm and solved the problem perfectly!
PS If you are having the same issue, there is the problem that one can't use a USB/FW drive to get the combo updater onto the problematic hard drive, and even if you can, the faulty software won't allow one to mount a .dmg image. This can be solved by using "Target" mode, eg connect the problematic CPU to a working CPU (in this case, my PowerBook) via a FW cable, then boot up the problem CPU while holding down the letter "t". One can then drag the combined updater unstuffed file (eg, not the .dmg) directly to the problematic disk from the working CPU. Then, when I booted in the problematic disk/CPU, all it took was a doubleclick on the unstuffed updater and all was fine.

Firewire drives refuse to connect

Hi,
I have two acomdata e5 firewire drives, which are refusing to mount. I have not experienced any problems with these daisy-chained drives with my new iMac until tonight when I had to reconnect them.
I just upgraded to 10.5.1 recently, but the drives mounted without any problems. Even tonight, when I brought the drives to a friend's house, they connected to his 8-core Mac without issue. But when I got home, they absolutely refuse to mount on my iMac.
I got one of the drives to appear on my iBook (10.4.9). The other doesn't. In addition to trying the same setup I had previously, I've tried three cords, zapping the pram and nvram, repairing permissions on the HD, performing the daily, weekly, monthly maintenance. I've tried both daisy-chaining and individual connections.
I do not believe there is a problem with the firewire port on the iMac, mainly because when I connect a new iPod with an old iPod firewire cable, the iPod recognizes it cannot connect via firewire. (I would think if the port were dead, the iPod wouldn't react the way it did.)
Are acomdata drivers just terrible drives? Did the 10.5.1 kill their ability to mount? Has anyone experienced similar issues and been able to get these drives to work? What is the trick? (Voodoo?)
Any suggestions or tips are greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.

Thank you DaddyPaycheck... I tried all those things, but unfortunately learned the drive was evil like Cujo and overloaded the Firewire port. I required a trip to my local Apple Store for a fix.
If anyone else has a similar problem, please be aware that your Firewire may port may have died. Apparently, when I brought my machine in, there were quite a few other iMacs in there with the same problem.
The Mac is now home and happy (and has a new Firewire drive to boot)!

Trouble with two hard drives including SMART failure

About a week ago my mac mini g4 that I've had for less than 3 years, crashed while I was using itunes and playing music off an external usb drive.
As a result there has been trouble with both drives:
*Internal hard drive failure:*
The internal drive would not boot and reported a fatal hardware error, with a SMART failure. Interestingly, when I start up the computer as a firewire target and run the same Disk Utility program, it does not report the fatal error. I was able to reformat this drive and it seems to now be booting and running fine.
*External hard drive failure*
The external hard drive worked intermittently and then died completely a few days later, where it is now unable to mount it at all.
Does this mean I have two failed hard drives? The internal one seems to work fine and has for over a week, even though it still says there was a S.M.A.R.T. failure. When Disk Utility says there was a hardware failure, it prevents me from running the verify/repair functions. Is it possible that the external drive failure was somehow attributed to the internal drive?
I think it is also strange that when I run the Disk Utility using firewire target, the internal hard drive tests fine.
The message I get is:
"This drive reported a fatal hardware error to disk utility. If the drive has not failed completely, back up as much data as you can and then replace it with a working drive."
and at the bottom it says:
"S.M.A.R.T. status: failing"
Meanwhile it works just fine and my other external drive has failed altogether.
I normally wouldn't question this error message, but the fact that the other drive failed more completely at around the same time, and that the error message doesn't show up when I run the disk utility on the internal drive via firewire makes me wonder if there are other factors. It's also just frustrating that I may need to replace both.
Other things I have done is run the Apple Hardware Test, and everything passed. I also tried a PMU reset, and that didn't help.
Should I just replace the internal hard drive or should I look for other problems?
I appreciate any advice on this.
Message was edited by: biz123

I'm not aware of any firmware update for the PPC minis - I've not had any with either of my own that I recall.
Of course future reliability is something you can never really check or fully assess, but the fact the system passes the hardware test tells us that the components which could have been responsible and which are not fairly easy to replace (the logic board, disk controller, PMU are all healthy. RAM could be a problem because the hardware test is not all that capable at revealing RAM issues, but it is also not likely to be the cause of this kind of problem. The PSU is obviously suspect to some degree, but is also replaceable.
While it's not common to suffer multiple drive failures, the fact one was active and the other could easily have been paging would account for the result if either failed in that situation. Bad luck and not easy to reproduce if you tried, but not inconceivable.
The fact that the internal rendered up your files while in FW target disk mode tends to indicate that the reason it wouldn't boot from that drive was not that the drive itself was trashed, but that the drive crashed during use - a circumstance which often creates catalog and file problems, and can certainly cause the system to fail in locating the MacOS install to boot from. In that situation, unless there is physical damage to the drive, it typically can be re-used with a reformat and reinstall, since of course that corrects the kind of catalog/file issues that this sort of crash typically causes. It would be expected to report 'verified' for SMART status though.
There are a few reasons why a damaged external might not appear in Disk Utility, or refuse to mount, some of which are broad;ly similar - a crash causing file or catalog issues. The fact it was FAT32 would complicate the matter to a small degree since if the allocation tables weren't visible to the Mac due to corruption, the system wouldn't have any way to mount the drive. That said, while it would likely be visible to a PC, and may even render up files in data recovery, it wouldn't be reusable itself without a reformat, and could well produce I/O errors in the process. It would usually be amenable to reformatting though it might also need repartitioning depending on the damage done. The overheating you mention may be an indicator of a fault, or it may be that the drive is being pushed to all 3 read attempts with each data block - that would cause it to work very hard! If you have rescue the data you think you can get off it, I'd suggest you try a reformat. If that fails, use a utility such as FDISK to delete all the partitions and recreate them, then try formatting again.
In terms of iTunes, any version will work, including 7.6. If music is stored on the external and that is USB connected, that would count for some speed impediment since iTunes is fairly cpu intensive, and the USB bus is also highly variable in performance, depending on CPU activity. But no, there is nothing in the latest version of iTunes that would cause a PPC to suffer such performance problems in itself, so you can use that quite safely. All are very cautious about this aspect of software design, since updates are often released to deal with stability or security issues, and must be usable for everyone.

"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 drives no longer mounting

I have two external drives connected via Firewire. The Lacie d2 is partitioned in two and it mounts automatically every morning when I start up the computer. The other is a NewerTech with a built-in Firewire/USB hub that I use to clone my iMac using SuperDuper. I only turn it on when I'm going to run SD because it's noisy. I bought a Seagate Barracuda drive and put in in a Macally enclosure for my daughter. I hooked it up via FW and turned it on. It mounted, a window popped up saying it couldn't be read and I clicked the button to Initialize, which opened Disk Utility. I clicked on Partition, then Options and chose the GUID partition. I clicked Partition and it chugged away for about an hour, getting nowhere. I then chose Erase and Zero Out Data. A window came up saying it couldn't be erased because it wasn't configured, and the drive icon disappeared. I turned it off and back on – no icon. I switched from FW to USB – no luck. I restarted with the drive on – no icon. Now neither of my other two drives will mount. They don't show up in Disk Utility or System Preferences > Startup Disk. I would appreciate any explanations of what I've done wrong and how to fix it. Thank you.
Cheers, Peter

Thank you for the information, baltwo. The problem now is that none of my drives mount, so I can't do anything with them. They don't show up on the Desktop, in Disk Utility or in System Preferences > Startup Disk. When I turn on the drive I use with SuperDuper, SD says it can't be found. In System Profiler > Firewire, I get a Warning, in red, Unable to list Firewire devices.
Cheers, Peter
Message was edited by: Pram

Daisy-Chained External Drive No Longer Mounting

I have two external hard drives daisy-chained (firewire 800) to my iMac. The hard drive directly connected my iMac mounts fine. The daisy-chained hard drive no longer mounts, after mounting perfectly fine for a few months. I've tried restarting, etc with no success. Any help would be appreciated.

moretoexplore wrote:
No, it does not mount directly. I did however try using the other hard drive's power cord and it mounted without problem. But this doesn't fix the problem.. only one drive is mounting. At least it seems I have ruled out a more serious problem with the drive itself. I'm contacting Lacie to get a new power cord. Hopefully, with a new power cord, this will resolve the issue and it isn't some sort of daisy-chain issue.
I think you have solved the problem by elimination.
You can prove that it's the power cord by using the "bad" one on the working drive. If it stops working, it's guaranteed to be the power cord.
I believe that there were some issues with some of the LaCie Power Supplies.
Message was edited by: nerowolfe

WD external hard drive won't mount

Hello,
I have a WD my passport 1TB external hard drive that will not mount. It has two partitions, one is a time machine backup, the other contains critical files. I thought I was backing up this second partition via SuperDuper, but for other reasons it stopped doing it's backup two years ago, so I now have two years worth of critical files that are seemingly inaccessible (my bad). I have done all the easy stuff like try it on other computers, changed cables, changed ports, tried it on PCs and Macs (I have a 2008 MBP). I have also taken it out of it's case, and even switched out the PCB with an exact copy (through PCB Solutions in Canada). Not long after I replaced the board, I got access again to the hard drive (though not right away), I began copying files as fast as possible (which was slow) and got about 25% (51GB) of the drive copied (less corrupt files). This took a couple days.
Then I stupidly shut down the computer as the drive seemed to be getting hot and I thought it worth the risk not to fry the board/drive. Alas, the hard drive would not mount again. I have tried to access it through the Terminal, as it does show up there (after a couple minutes) if I do a diskutil list like this:
Melissa-McManuss-MacBook-Pro:~ melissa$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *512.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Melissa's SSD           511.1 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                                                   *1.0 TB     disk1
It does not show up in Disk Utility or Finder however.
It will show up in Disk Utility after the Finder gives up on trying to mount it. It shows up as "1TB WD My Passport 0171D Media", but does not show the partitions.
I have read other similar cases, I can tell you that the fsck. program does not show up in the Activity Monitor. So this is not my problem.
I am out of potential remedies, but am loathe to send it to the Data Recovery people if not absolutely necessary (for obvious reasons).
Thank you in advance for any potential help!

Your best bet is DiskWarrior,...
http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/
Hold option key or alt key when selecting when choosing Rebuild, then use Scavenge, that may make a temporary directory that can then be used for copying the files.
If DW doesn't even see it or work, then...
Data Rescue...
http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php
rccharles on file recovery...
"Stellar Phoenix Macintosh - Mac data recovery software, recovers data from damaged, deleted, or corrupted volumes and even from initialized disks."
They have a trial version, so I guess you can see if your data can be recovered...
http://www.stellarinfo.com/mac-data-recovery.htm
FileSalvage is an extremely powerful Macintosh application for exploring and recovering deleted files from a drive or volume. FileSalvage is designed to restore files that have:
    * been accidentally deleted.
    * become unreadable due to media faults.
    * been stored on a drive before it was re-initialized/formatted.
http://subrosasoft.com/OSXSoftware/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id= 1
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=11073082#11073082

Two FW800 drives refuse to mount

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for