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Level 1

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Finder crashes when accessing my external hard drive

I have a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 1TB external hard drive where I keep a lot of my extra data. Very recently, I can't pin-point exactly when, the hard drive has been causing Finder to crash, most of the time irreparably -- and by irreparably I mean it will crash and I'll try to relaunch it but it won't work, in fact it won't actually relaunch unless I then click the Finder icon (which had no dot under it), after which it will immediately launch into an "Application Not Responding" state.

The reason I believe it is the external hard drive is because I have two computers, both of which have the same problems when doing stuff with the hard drive, and neither have problems when the hard drive isn't plugged in.

Some weird things: I have been accessing an excel document on the drive and have been saving the document this entire time -- before I began to think that it was the hard drive causing these problems. It seems as though I could open that document and save it without any apparent problems. Same sort of thing when I used Ableton Live recently. I could access my sample library on the external drive through Live's browser and it would seem to work just fine. However, with Live, when I tried to save a project it would immediately crash Live (presumably because Live is trying to save via Finder or something?). I can't remember if Finder would subsequently crash or not, but I remember having terrible issues with Finder crashing around the times I would be using Live and trying to save.

I tried doing a Repair Disk on the external through Disk Utility, but after it was showing only the stripey progress bar down at the bottom and only saying "Verifying and Reparing Disk," for a little while I stopped it and tried to quit Disk Utility, only to have Disk Utility crash and now Finder crash as well.

Another couple of things to note. Finder is not able to copy something to or from the external, or move something from the external to the trash. It will be stuck at 0 percent progress and if I press the x it will say "Stopping" and never go away. However when I do that and then just unplug my external I immediatley get a "Disk removed improperly" dialog and Finder will work again right away.

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.4)

Posted on May 29, 2012 9:33 PM

25 replies

X423424X

Level 6

14,265 points

May 30, 2012 8:53 PM in response to zoycobot

As for the kexts, if I look inside the Extensions folder there are actually a whole bunch of kexts that don't contain the world "apple" in the filename.

It's not the filename that's important. I alluded to this earlier (if you want specifics it's the bundle identifier inside the kext code bundle). Type just kextstat in terminal and you will see what I mean.

To clarify some things: the harddrive will mount even when not booting in Safe Mode. It mounts without crashing Finder and everything seems fine. I can select it in Finder and navigate through the directories just fine. That is until I start to try to do things with the files stored on the external. As soon as I try to move/copy/trash/save the files then Finder goes completely haywire and shuts down.

So do you think I should try removing that seagate kext and try using my harddrive to see if everything works? I'm hesitant to remove anything m-audio related because at this point I don't want to "ruin" anything else that's currently working just fine on my computer, and as I've mentioned above, having my external audio interface is very important to me.

You're decision. Remove the segate stuff and take your chances with the drive. If it works, fine. Or remove the maudio stuff which definitely won't affect the drive but may solve your problem.

zoycobot Author

Level 1

0 points

May 30, 2012 8:56 PM in response to X423424X

Alright I'm going to do some further experimentation with removing the kexts in a little bit.

For now, some further information that may be elucidating:

When booted in Safe Mode I still get the same problems trying to access and change data stored on the hard drive. Don't know if that says anything about the kexts being the issue or not, since it seems that Safe Mode would not allow the kexts in question to load (so perhaps this rules out those kexts as being the root of the problem?).

Furthermore, I actually just tried using Terminal to copy data from the hard drive to the desktop and it managed to copy one of the files as a test case without any issue. Now I'm having it copy over one of my folders (containing about 7.5gb worth of audio samples) to see if it will do that without problems too.

It seems like this is pointing more and more to a specific problem with finder and its relation to the hard drive?

X423424X

Level 6

14,265 points

May 30, 2012 9:34 PM in response to zoycobot

Well if you are still having the problem in safe mode it's not the kexts. Maybe it's the drive or enclosure itself.

If you do get that stuff off the drive, enough with it already, and get a decent enclosure (like those at OWC) with no accompanying software.

Good luck.

zoycobot Author

Level 1

0 points

May 30, 2012 9:53 PM in response to X423424X

Well it seems like moving things around via Terminal is working completely fine for now, so I'll just do that and then see if I can't find a friend's external to temporarily store stuff while I do a complete wipe and reformat of my external to see if that does the trick. If not, then yeah **** GoFlex and I'll buy a whole new one.

Thanks so much for your help, I really appreciate the time and effort it takes to sit down and troubleshoot with someone 🙂

X423424X

Level 6

14,265 points

May 30, 2012 9:58 PM in response to zoycobot

If you get as far as wanting to wipe that drive, get that segate software out of there first. Perhaps then the enclosure will behave as a dumb box so you can use the disk inside without any "outside" interference.

The curious part is how the box installs that software in the first place if you didn't do it. So the crazy thing is it might do it again if the wipe doesn't wipe that stuff too.

jon87

Level 1

0 points

Sep 28, 2012 12:55 AM in response to zoycobot

I see this is an old post, but I'm having the exact same problem. My external drive is a Hewlett Packard. Any advice?

Feb 15, 2013 2:26 AM in response to zoycobot

I fall in the same problem with WD.

After all kind of rebooting, disk checking and voodoo dances, I've try to delite all hiden files in the root of drive by terminal. I don't know what was wrong with those files, but finder stoped it's hysterical crashes. 😉

Jan 9, 2014 9:06 AM in response to zoycobot

So I'm having the same issue but not quite sure if I understand the solution. Did you have to wipe the drive completely or move things around? I am a producer as well so you know how much the loss of file affect your productivity.

Jan 31, 2014 1:31 AM in response to zoycobot

No, You have not to wipe it completely, just DELITE HIDDEN files. I've solve this problem with the little help of "Midnight Commander". You can use it or any other instrument which allows You to deal with hiden files.

May 11, 2016 3:59 PM in response to zoycobot

I am now experiencing this same problem. I have been using the same 1TB Toshiba HDD for quite sometime now. I did recently (finally) update my OS from 10.5 to 10.6.8 (not much i know but im working with what i can afford currently)

My Macbook is the later 09 black version. Still works just fine, so I have not wanted to upgrade.

Recently I went to open the external drive on my desktop, where it still appears there and everywhere else, when i click it; it freezes the finder then crashes it.

I plugged the HDD into a PC and it loads all of my files just fine. I have a lot of photoshop files in there I would like to not erase, so wiping it isnt really an option if the files are still ok.

I have looked through countless threads and tried repairing via disk utility and even a bug update for the HDD itself, but nothing seems to work.

Finder crashes when accessing my external hard drive