External drive will mount on clone but not original volume

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External drive will mount on clone but not original volume

I have 10.8.5 on an iMac that has two partitions on the internal drive; one partition is cloned to the other (call 'em Main and Clone). The only diff is that Main is slightly more up to date. I also have an external (External) with some stuff on it, but not the system.

On Main I ran into a big hang in Mail that led to the whole system slowing to a crawl; I ejected External and it seemed to be gone from Finder, but Finder subsequently hung. On restart of Main the External didn't mount. Didn't show in Disk Utility. Tried switching ports and cables in Firewire but still didn't show.

As part of cleaning up the mess with Main I booted into clone. Then I tried plugging in the external, this time with USB (same case; has both FW and USB). It mounted fine. Ran Disk Utility and Tech Tool 7 and both report drive is fine. Swapped it back to FW and mounts fine in Clone.

So I boot back into Main with the External still connected and get a "Disk removed improperly blah blah" alert and no External. Try both FW and USB and same no show.

Why won't the drive mount on Main but will on its clone? How can I fix it?

Posted on Nov 5, 2013 9:25 AM

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Answer 1

Rob Gendreau Author

Level 2

165 points

Nov 5, 2013 9:53 AM in response to Rob Gendreau

Hmm.

I deleted a Tech Tool 7 "eDrive," which is a partition that serves like Apple's recovery disk, in that it has a partition that makes it bootable. I then zapped the PRAM (which I wouldn't think would be volume-dependent, but what the heck). Now it mounts.

I'd like to avoid this in the future, so I'd still like to know what happened.

Rob

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