External Hard Drive Not Appearing on desktop

Hi! Get and run DiskWarrior. Sometimes after a restart a FW drive won't appear but after turning it off and on it will. This is likely a firmware problem with the case. Tom

scott:

You have done the basic troouble shooting already. You can also try shutting down the computer and the HDD, disconnecting, reconnecting the external HDD via firewire then turning it on again and rebooting the computer.

If that does not work my guess is that you have a failed firewire bridge. You can continue to use the drive as a USB drive. If you need it as a Firewire HDD you can remove it from the current enclosure and place it in a firewire like this one at OWC. Note this enclosure has the more reliable Oxford 911+ chipset.

Please do post back with further questions or comments.

Good luck.

cornelius

Scott:

You have done a very thorough job of trouble shooting. I believe that confirms my diagnosis of a failed firewire bridge.

Please keep us updated about what you find out from AppleCare.

Good luck.

cornelius

Some FW can be returned to working by removing all power, clock battery and A/CX cable included for overnight, then try to start the Mac with no memory in it. Assuming it's the Macs FW, if it's the Drives, then a new case/bridge is in order

BD:

The OP reports that the drive works with the USB interface, but not the Firewire. In other words, the computer is aware of the presence of the drive. In addition, the OP reports having shut down and disconnecting the computer and the drive for an extended period with the same outcome. That is the basis for my suspecting the firewire bridge.

😉 cornelius

If it now shows up in DU with both UUSB & FW, then Cornelius was right about at least one thing! 🙂

Now it seems you must have severly damaged Directory & such on that HD, Your best bet for repairing you HD is DiskWarrior from Alsoft...

http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/

If that shouldn't work, your best bet for recovering your data is Data Rescue II...

http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php

This last one would require another HD with plenty of space to recover to.

Scott:

Does the drive show up in the sidebar if you launch Disk Utility? If you have data on the drive that you need to salvage, BDAqua's suggestion to use DataRescue II might be in order. Download the demo version. You can run it and see if it finds any files, then if you think it is worth it to you, you can pay for the license and get the full use of the software.

Good luck.

cornelius

Scott:

I take it from your explanation that even though it appears in all three of the utilities that my only remaining option is to use DataRescue II. Correct?

Let's say that it is the only one that occurs to me at this time of night 🙂
The demo version will at least show you that the data is still there. Another option might be to use SuperDuper to see if you can clone the User's Folder, or indeed the entire volume to an external firewire HDD, then using DU to reformat and erase the HDD (post for directions if needed) and clone back from external firewire HDD.

Yes, the drive does show up in sidebar in all three of the utilities I mentioned.

Is it possible to run Repair Disk in Disk Utility and see how it comes out? Or if you have done it already, what does it say?

While in Disk Utility, select the Manufacture ID of the external HDD and then look at the look at the icons at the very top. Is Mount dimmed or active? If active, click on it to mount the HDD.

Also, what happens if you try to Option boot?

If anything else occurs to me I will post back in the morning.

Cheers 🙂

cornelius

Message was edited by: cornelius