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OS X Mavericks doesn't read my external hard drive

Dear Apple Support Community,


Yesterday I bought a new MacBook Pro with OS X Mavericks.

I tried to connect by quite new external hard drive bought in Germany, a Spaceloop 3.0 1.5 Tb by CnMemory.


I can see the external drive on my desktop but it looks like it is empty, although there are something like 600 Gb of data in it.

I reconnected it to my old white MacBook and everything looks fine.


Do you have any suggestion?


Thank you in advance for the help,

Marco

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Mavericks (10.9.2)

Posted on Apr 11, 2014 7:10 AM

Reply
62 replies

Apr 14, 2014 8:06 PM in response to Mark Piaskiewicz1

I think most problems started appearing when the EFI changed from 32 bit to 64 bit. I've never, myself, had a USB or Firewire drive fail except on Mavericks where it did some weird stuff until I disabled drive sleep, but then again I take it right out of the box, skip any drivers, and put it to work.


The two rules of thumb I use with external drives are:


  1. Don't mix Dos/Windows and Mac
  2. Don't use external drivers


The latter is more important because it means you're relying on the company that developed the drivers to keep them up to date and they often don't.

Apr 15, 2014 4:19 AM in response to ZV137

Hi guys, thanks for keeping on helping me.


I gave a try to your suggestions:


- "ignore ownership on this volume" is greyed out and not selectable

- "disable the "Put hard disk to sleep when possible" option under System Preferences -> Energy Saver options" > I tried to disable it but apparently nothing changes.


I'll try the NVRAM reset now, and let you know.

Apr 16, 2014 3:34 AM in response to Mark Piaskiewicz1

Hi Mark,


I tried and something actually changed. Now, for a short period of time (like 5 mins - while Mavericks is reading the content of the hard drive), I can delete files and create new folders on the external drive, but nothing more.


According to the discussion I posted in advance (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5514094?start=0&tstart=0) there might be a huge USB-related issue due to some Apple programmer. They are also talking about USB A and USB B and different behaviours. Do you think this can be fix with a Maverick update?


I wrote to CnMemory two days ago but got no reply so far.


Ah, I just tried to connect a Packard Bell external drive of a friend and it works perfectly.

Apr 16, 2014 5:03 AM in response to marconerix1980

I tried the Drive Genius 3 demo on it but I get the following messages for every kind of operation:


"Unmount attempt failed for "AMNESIAC". The disk may be in use by an application. (disk2s1, Device is busy 0xC010)"


Here the details of the external drive:


Display Name: AMNESIAC

BSD Name: disk2s1

Drive Title: OEM Ext Hard Disk Media

S.M.A.R.T.: The S.M.A.R.T. service is not supported by this disk.

Whole: No

Leaf: Yes

RAID Slice: No

Writable: Yes

Mounted: Yes

BSD Major: 1

BSD Minor: 9

Block Count: 366.284.032

Block Size: 4.096 bytes

Size: 1,5 TB (1,36 TiB, 1.500.299.395.072 bytes)

Formatted As: Mac OS Extended

Volume Block Count: 366.284.032

Volume Block Size: 4.096 bytes

Volume Size: 1,5 TB (1,36 TiB, 1.500.299.395.072 bytes)

Unique ID: 0A549273-78F5-3A43-A51A-30CAC45A1DE2

Journal: Enabled

Used: 569,36 GB (530,26 GiB, 569.362.132.992 bytes), 37,95%

Available: 930,94 GB (867 GiB, 930.937.262.080 bytes), 62,05%

Number of Files: 86.227

Number of Folders: 12.000

Connected Via: USB

Removable: No

Ejectable: Yes

Volume Locked: No

Content Hint: Apple_HFS

Content: Apple_HFS


signature: H+

version: 4

attributes: 0x80002000

lastMountedVersion: HFSJ

journalInfoBlock: 11.180

createDate: 2014-04-12 20:20:38 +0000

modifyDate: 2014-04-16 13:50:56 +0000

backupDate: 0

checkedDate: 2014-04-12 20:20:38 +0000

fileCount: 86.222

folderCount: 11.996

blockSize: 4.096

totalBlocks: 366.284.032

freeBlocks: 227.279.663

nextAllocation: 141.918.267

rsrcClumpSize: 65.536

dataClumpSize: 65.536

nextCatalogID: 98.629

writeCount: 110.978

encodingsBitmap: 0

finderInfo_volumeID: 0xD20CC0293E067A6C

finderInfo_blessedFolderID: 0

allocationFile_logicalSize: 45.789.184

allocationFile_clumpSize: 45.789.184

allocationFile_totalBlocks: 11.179

allocationFile_startBlock: 1

allocationFile_extentsCount: 1

extentsFile_logicalSize: 14.680.064

extentsFile_clumpSize: 14.680.064

extentsFile_totalBlocks: 3.584

extentsFile_startBlock: 39.853

extentsFile_extentsCount: 1

catalogFile_logicalSize: 308.281.344

catalogFile_clumpSize: 308.281.344

catalogFile_totalBlocks: 75.264

catalogFile_startBlock: 871.341

catalogFile_extentsCount: 1

attributesFile_logicalSize: 308.281.344

attributesFile_clumpSize: 308.281.344

attributesFile_totalBlocks: 75.264

attributesFile_startBlock: 43.437

attributesFile_extentsCount: 1

lastUsedBlock: 141.918.267

metadataZone_startBlock: 1

metadataZone_blockCount: 458.752

Apr 16, 2014 7:08 AM in response to marconerix1980

Amnesiac is not a good name for a hard drive. 😁



Drive Genius isn’t all that useful but it does have a surface scan function. Try running that on the drive. It’ll take a while, but the results will be informative.



Do you have access to another HD case? It would be interesting to take the drive mechanism out of its current enclosure and try to eliminate that as a cause. Or something like this would be massively helpful.

Apr 16, 2014 6:08 PM in response to marconerix1980

I know it's been asked if you installed drivers for the software and the response was "No." How about other software like anti-virus software or "cleaning" tools like MacKeeper etc. (Side Note: Let's please not turn this into another MacKeeper fiasco).


In any case tools like MacKeeper can do odd things to your system like delete critical files. Anti-virus software will often see anything it doesn't understand as an intruder and prevent access to the drive.


Normally if a volume can't unmount it would be because the system or a user is using something on that drive. Assuming this isn't the case, anti-virus software may be stopping Drive Genius from unmounting the volume.


...of course you would have to have something like that installed for it to be a problem.

Apr 17, 2014 2:15 AM in response to marconerix1980

I contacted Apple Support via chat, and they told this seems to be a firmwire issue to be solved by CnMemory with updated firmwire, but I contacted them three times now and didn't get any answer 😟


The firmwires on their website seems to be tremendously outdated, though.

http://www.cnmemory.de/treiber-firmware


I wasn't even able to open them.

Apr 17, 2014 2:32 AM in response to marconerix1980

If it was me I'd return the drive. One of the problems I've seen cropping up with external drives is they seem to be too reliant on firmware updates and drivers. For example, the Western Digital "MyBook" series won't even actually function at 100% unless you update both the firmware and their drivers. If their drivers aren't installed, then the power switch won't work and the volume space indicator lights stay at the bottom, even though the drive might be 80% full. Their drivers, when Mavericks came out, were actually outdated and the system would delete files because they don't keep stuff up to date. When I contacted WD about this problem they told me they had no support for Mac's, only Windows, and yet they advertise this as a Mac product.


From now on I'll just build my own external unit by buying a raw HD and then putting it into a simple, no frills case. I have some old FireWire and USB external housings like that, and I have no problems with them with any version of MacOS, including Mavericks.


At least you know it was a compatibiltiy problem.


Ciao

Apr 18, 2014 10:46 AM in response to marconerix1980

We had a similar problem with an external WD., We use a product named Scannerz to test the our drives (http://scsc-online.com/Scannerz.html) and on having problems with a drive we called their tech support and they told us they were seeing a lot of this on Mavericks.... well, maybe not a lot, but I gather it seems to be a higher than normal percentage. I asked them if they could elaborate on whether it was a USB, FireWire, or Thunderbolt specific problem and they indicated they hadn't heard any reports about problelms like this with FireWire or Thunderbolt, but pointed out that these days USB drives probably outnumber other types by more than 10:1 ratio.


It's rather odd, because if someone says they're having some type of a problem with something in Mavericks, others not having the problems act like they're in an utter state of disbelief.

Apr 18, 2014 11:54 AM in response to CaptH

A big part of the problem is that the majority of people doing the complaining, A) don’t have a bootable backup, B) don’t have the tools to properly diagnose the problem, and C) never wanted to spend the money on drives or utilities to backup, diagnose and repair their drive, but just want it fixed.



Every time new OS comes out. some people complain that their drives are no longer recognized. I suspect that this is because they upgraded without doing the requisite maintenance on their drive prior to the upgrade and without a bootable backup in case of a failure.

OS X Mavericks doesn't read my external hard drive

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