Mavericks won't restart with external drive attached.

Question

Level 2

264 points

Mavericks won't restart with external drive attached.

Upgraded to Mavericks yesterday and noticed that my Mac won't restart (logs out like normal, but hangs on the grey screen before rebooting). Spent the most of today trying to figure out what it was and finally pinned it down to an external FireWire 800 drive attached to my system. I have four FireWire 800 dirves (all the same make/model) attached (chained), but just one of the drives is the issue—the rest work fine.

I imagine it's a hardware issue with the drive itself, but didn't have this issue yesterday under Mountain Lion.

Anyone—wondering if anyone else has experienced this?

Ran a full host of hardware/software tests on the drive, rebuilt it, etc. but nothing's worked. Probably best to scrap the drive, but again, just wanted to see if anyone else has been experiencing this under Mavericks?

Thanks,

Kristin.

Posted on Oct 29, 2013 12:45 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Oct 29, 2013 1:20 PM in response to kristin.

It's not your drive. I have a brand new Seagate 4TB external drive currently connected via USB2 and it works just fine until I reboot. My Mac mini has two internal hard drives and this one external drive. When the drive is not connected my Mac boots up just fine. With the USB drive attached however, OSX appears to be trying to boot from the USB drive. I say this because the drive is mostly silent under normal use but during bootup I can hear the heads seeking heavily. And it non ending. If I remove the drive while this is happening the computer completely freezes up. If I boot without the drive attached the bootup is nice and quiet and boots in very little time.

As soon as I plug the drive in while already booted up the drive works just fine.

So the issue is most likely due to a change to the EFI that was probably made to support booting mavericks from USB thumb drives that is misbehaving. But that's just my uninformed take on it. Since I haven't done any real diagnostics yet. Just isolated the source of the boot issue as you did.

I am using mavericks and OSX Server on a Mac Mini with 16G Ram and two internal drives.

Reply

Answer 2

kristin. Author

Level 2

264 points

Oct 29, 2013 1:27 PM in response to Armand Welsh

Yea, not sure if this is a similar issue. I'm dealing with FireWire 800 drives (four of them, all the same make/model, but just the one is causing the restart issue), all chained together via a single FireWire 800 port, and I have no issues booting up with the affected drive attached, it's just when I try and restart. It's like it can't unmount the drive and thus can't complete the cycle to reboot.

I am running Mavericks on a Mac Mini with 16GBRAM and two internal drives as well (one SSD, one SATA). I also have the same setup at home, with the same make & model external drives, and no issues there either.

k.

Reply

Answer 3

Nov 24, 2013 9:55 PM in response to kristin.

I have upgraded to Mavericks. I have a MacBook Pro 13 with a FireWire 800 HD that won't restart when it is connected. If I restart it without the HD connected it restarts okay. It will boot up from a complete shutdown with the FireWire 800 HD connected.

Reply

Answer 4

timautin

Level 1

4 points

Dec 16, 2013 11:27 AM in response to kristin.

Hi,

I have the same problem on a brand new iMac with a LaCie Porshe Design 1To : the boot stops on the grey screen of death just before the apparition of the apple and wheel, and the external drive is heavily working.

Everything is OK on a good old MacBook of late 2008 running Lion.

The disk is new.

Tim

Reply

Answer 5

Mar 23, 2014 2:24 PM in response to kristin.

I have this issue too and not just with external drive. I can't even connect a keyboard to my brand new Mac Mini Server without the OS hanging at the grey screen. Had the same problem with previous machine and bought new one assuming it was a hardware issue. Now it very much seems like an OS issue. Since new machine has Apple Care I sure hope they are able to help find a fix since it doesn't seem that the issue is being resolved via the support forums.

Reply

Answer 6

Mar 23, 2014 2:29 PM in response to rickscullyvermont

After a few months a major update to mavericks solved the issue for me. In my case if I boot up now with a USB device attached it now boots fine. It is just a little slower but completely bearable as it only adds about 20 seconds to regular boot time.

Reply

Answer 7

timautin

Level 1

4 points

Mar 23, 2014 4:16 PM in response to kristin.

Fixed for me to, with no delay added when booting.

Reply