I just reinstalled the OS. I'm using Mac OSX 10.5. Before the reinstallation I was able to access a firewire drive I use. After the installation, I am not. The drive is recognized though! It shows up but when I try to open it, it appears as though it is continuously trying to access the content and basically freezes my computer until I disconnect the drive (which I know I shouldn't do).
How do I resolve this?
macbook, Mac OS X (10.5.4)
It's possible Spotlight is doing an inventory of the drive which can tie things up for a while. How long have you let it run like that? You could add the drive to Spotlight's privacy list.
Well, right now I have the beach ball of death as I try to access the Spotlight details in Sys Pref. How long could it take for someone to access a terabyte hard drive? Again, the drive shows but it just has a spinning loading animation in the bottom right corner of the window when i try to view the contents of my drive. Might this go on for 15mins, 30mins, an hour? Thanks.
One way to test is to Safe Boot from the HD, (holding Shift key down at bootup), run Disk Utility in Applications>Utilities, then highlight your drive, click on Repair Permissions, Test for problem in Safe Mode...
PS. Safe boot may stay on the gray radian for a long time, let it go, it's trying to repair the Hard Drive
Reboot, test again.
If it only does it in Regular Boot, then it could be some hardware problem like Video card, (Quartz is turned off in Safe Mode), or Airport in 10.4 & below, or 3rd party add-on, Check System Preferences>Accounts>Login Items window to see if it or something relevant is listed.
Check the System Preferences>Other Row, for 3rd party Pref Panes.
I can't access my external hard drive
