Cannot mount external USB drive with FDisk_partition_scheme

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Level 1

8 points

Cannot mount external USB drive with FDisk_partition_scheme

Due to some recent mac issues in my lab, we updated one of the computers to Maverick 10.9.4 from Snow Leopard 10.6.8 yesterday. Anyhow, this seems to have erased the ability of the mac to read or mount several identical USB drives with the NTFS format (WD My Passport Ultra 500GB USB3.0). It could do it yesterday when it was OSX 10.6.8, but not today (OSX 10.9.4). The drives still work fine on other OSX 10.6.8, Windows 8.1 and Ubuntu 14.04 computers (this is appears to be a problem with the Maverick 10.9.4 operating system itself, rather than the flash drives which work flawlessly with every other computer I've tried). I want to remove data from the computer to create backups on the USB drives (no, I don't want to create an online backup or buy a new set of USB drives).

diskutil can see the drives, but cannot verify or repair them as they lack a GUID (GPT) partition scheme. I'm assuming this is the root of the problem. Manually mounting the drives does not work. Installing the ntfs-3g driver also did not work (I was using this to write to the NTFS drives until we upgraded OS's). Installing the WD Passport drivers for OSX also did not work. How do I get the mac to mount these drives?

I could reformat one USB drive and then copy to the others, but this would be extremely inconvenient and take days of copying files back and forth (and would prefer to fix the mac rather than go through this with every NTFS drive I own). If I did this, the FAT32 hard drive format would not be suitable, as format is unable to handle the extremely large sequencing datasets I need to transfer. I'm not super familiar with hard drive formats, but in the event we cannot get Maverick to actually work could someone possibly suggest a format able to handle large file sizes (the largest file I need to move is ~60GB) and be compatible with Windows 8.1 / OSX 10.9.4 / Ubuntu 14.04 as well?

Another workaround I thought of would be just to install an Ubuntu partition on the mac and get the files off through the Linux install. Which is also inconvenient, but would probably be faster than trying to reformat the drives and copy everything over onto them again given the amount of data I want to transfer.

Unrelated, but is there any way to view files and folders in the OSX root directory besides through Terminal? It seems like this functionality was also removed when we "upgraded" from Snow Leopard. (At this point, if it were up to me I would wipe all of the macs we own and replace them with Ubuntu... even the most minor of tasks always require some sort of workaround with them... at my wits end here 😝).

iMac, OS X Mavericks (10.9.4)

Posted on Aug 7, 2014 6:45 PM

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Answer 1

kazi11 Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 8, 2014 2:01 PM in response to Alberto Ravasio

Reread my original post. Maverick cannot even mount the NTFS drive, much less read it. Snow Leopard dist seems to have no problem with this however. diskutil can see the drive, but not mount it for some strange reason. See below (I'm trying to mount the "Aaeg Head RNA-Seq" Windows_NTFS drive):

@ rkaufmann87 - it's true, NTFS is not a very well supported format in OSX. Could you possibly suggest a different format with the ability to handle large file sizes and have excellent cross-platform compatibility?

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Answer 2

rkaufmann87

Level 10

148,452 points

Aug 7, 2014 8:45 PM in response to kazi11

This is not an issue with 10.9.4 but it is likely that you are using a non OS X format (NFS) and using a third party utility (NTFS) to attempt to force the drive to work with OS X. I would suggest you contact the developers of NTFS and see if they're product is designed to support Mavericks 10.9.4, if it is ensure you have the most up-to-date edition of the application.

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Answer 3

Aug 8, 2014 7:12 AM in response to kazi11

OS X is able to read NTFS formatted drive since many years, and Mavericks is no exception. It cannot however write on such a volume.

Tuxera NTFS for Mac, among others, add this capability and is fully compatible with Mavericks. You can try the product before buying. If there are other similar software installed would be a better idea to remove them.

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Answer 4

Aug 8, 2014 2:16 PM in response to kazi11

kazi11 wrote:

Reread my original post. Maverick cannot even mount the NTFS drive, much less read it.

You mean your Mavericks installation cannot read NTFS volumes. My iMac and MacBook Pro, both running Mavericks, can read NTFS without problem.

From the picture you posted looks like you have ntfs-3g installed. Maybe that is the culprit.

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Answer 5

rkaufmann87

Level 10

148,452 points

Aug 8, 2014 4:05 PM in response to kazi11

You are stuck with NTFS if you insist on using a single EHD to manage files between platforms, however again this is NOT a OS X issue, NFS is a MS Windows format and NTFS is simply a third party kludge to try to get OS X to work with it. IMHO you should set up discreet EHD's for each platform or even better use something like Dropbox to manage the files you want to share in a cross platform enviroment. Yes it's more expensive than a EHD but you will continue to have issues going down the road you are on.

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Answer 6

kazi11 Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 8, 2014 5:12 PM in response to Alberto Ravasio

@Alberto Ravasio - I installed ntfs-3g only AFTER it was apparent the mac couldn't read the drives, so ntfs-3g cannot be contributing to the problem if Maverick was having a problem before it was even installed.

@rkaufmann87 - I already have online backups on the computer cluster where I generated the data, but it's extremely unwise to be caught without physical backups as well. It also most certainly IS an OSX issue if it cannot read or mount these NTFS drives as advertised. Snow Leopard can and Maverick can't for some dumb reason. I just want to mount the drive and then troubleshoot from there.

I can get the data off the computer by other means, but would otherwise like to continue using NTFS, even if it's read-only on OSX. If Maverick can't recognize or read an NTFS drive as advertised, there is a problem with OSX itself (or at least my install) and I would like to find the solution/workaround so I don't have to reformat literally every hard drive I own just to accommodate a single computer running 10.9.4.

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Answer 7

rkaufmann87

Level 10

148,452 points

Aug 8, 2014 7:37 PM in response to kazi11

Well I'm done, you seem to feel like you MUST have some type of physical solution in your eviroment. That is pretty antiquated computing and I'm not going to try and change you.

Good luck and hope you find something that make you happy.

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Answer 8

Aug 9, 2014 12:53 AM in response to kazi11

If you need read/write support over different OSs you can use exFAT more info here.

OS X support to exFAT started since 10.6.5 and is supported on many Linux distro as well.

But, I'd like to point out, if you have trouble with NTFS in read mode; the only official mode supported by OS X by default, that is without third party software; is a problem with your Mac and not of Mavericks in general.

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Answer 9

kazi11 Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 11, 2014 6:26 PM in response to Alberto Ravasio

Yeah this definitely appears to be a problem specifically with this mac. It's been having all sorts of weird problems lately, and we figured that upgrading to Maverick might fix them (but instead we got new problems).

To give an update on this, I ended up reformatting one of the drives to HFS+ and disabled journaling. It now recognizes the drive again, and I'm pulling the files off that way. I looked at exFAT, but it looks like HFS+ has much better Linux support (Windows is read-only but that's only a minor annoyance, as the algorithms to process the data only run on UNIX machines anyways). It's a shame I couldn't keep using NTFS (had to copy over literally EVERYTHING again...) but whatever. Again, no solution for the issue (where this mac can't read NTFS drives).

@rkaufmann87 - To give a bit more explanation, we recently had to disable online backups because apparently the sheer amount of data causes Time Machine to freeze the computer and fail every time it has a scheduled backup (original issue we thought that upgrading to Maverick would solve... didn't work). The hard drive has been having a lot of issues when it begins to reach max capacity as well. So I am pulling off all of my files to external hard drives and deleting the local copy before we attempt to back up online again. And the data would probably take me a year and a lot of money to recreate (for the curious, it's high throughput sequencing data). I'm choosing not to take any chances as a result.

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Answer 10

Aug 12, 2014 12:24 AM in response to kazi11

I'm sorry to say that upgrade a computer that has problems, means you are looking for trouble in the first place.

Personally I prefer to start from scratch. Apple certainly did the best to alleviate user transition from one major OS X version to another. But to some initial conditions, that almost none who is in the process to do it, is willing to, or "forgets" to follow.

The results are evident. Forums are full of people complain.

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Answer 11

csperoni

Level 1

0 points

Nov 10, 2014 7:10 AM in response to kazi11

I am sure you have fixed the issue by now, but just wanted to post in case anyone else is having this same issue as I was.
I found that after upgrading I could no longer mount my Bootcamp partition from the Mac partition, using disk utility as always it gave me the same error as you, I found that going to the spotlight search and typing NTFS it brought up a system preferences for NTFS-3G, I opened that and disabled NTFS-3G and was able to mount the partition with no issues at all.
Hope this helps anyone who is having issues like this!

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