How do I mount my internal hard drive?

Try doing this:

Drive Preparation

1. Boot from your Snow Leopard Installer flash drive. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.

2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.

3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID then click on the OK button. Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.

4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.

5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.

6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.

When formatting has completed quit DU and return to the installer. Complete the OS X installation.

Apple USB Disk should be the installer flash drive, so select the entry Disk 1.

Then there's been a hardware failure. Take it in for repair.

They would be lost.

This reply is two years after the original posting but I am putting it here for future FYI.

I have an external LaCie SSD and I use it as my main drive. It works great, I cannot say enough about the LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt SSD. Strongly recommended and available via Apple's store. One thing I did notice however is that my internal HDD is still referenced on occasion, especially during an "Open With" command is used in the Finder. The thing is that the internal HDD tends to go to sleep. When that happens my super fast SSD has to agonizingly "wait" like "FOREVER" for the HDD to wake up. Since I only use the internal 7200 RPM HDD as a back up (via Carbon Copy Cloner) I really don't need it mounted al the time. So I unmounted it this morning. Then I needed to find out how to remount it. To do so simply go into Disk Utility, highlight the HDD and select Mount.

I have picked up Parallels Desktop 9 recently and it's much more capable over what VirtualBox can do (and VirtualBox is an exellent product in it's own rite). One thing I noticed is that I Linux VMs running under it tend to be much more respondsive in the GUI. In my set up this is largely due to the fact that the VM runs under it's own virtual disk space, which is not set up to access any HDD (unless I tell it to do that). As such it's very very very respondsive. The way I expected my late model 2012 iMac to be (pursuant of sleeping HDDs).

Have a good day,

Perry