External Hard Drives not Mounting after Yosemite Upgrade

I had a very similar situation. Today, I finally had a break-thru. Here's the synopsis of my situation and what I did to resolve it.

ISSUE: Inability to mount NTFS-formatted volumes on my MacBook Pro ((13-inch, Mid 2012) running MacOS X 10.10.xDETAILS: Although NTFS-formatted volumes mount on my iMac and on an older MacBook, the same volume wouldn’t mount on my MacBook Pro. I have Bootcamp installed on my new MacBook Pro and my iMac, and the same NTFS volume mounts on those, as well.

ANALYSIS: I have owned several MacBooks over the years, going back to 2001. As I have upgraded from older ones to new ones, I have used Apple’s “Migration Assistant” to move all of the files to the new MacBook. However, over those same years, I have installed and deleted several tools and Virtual Machines so that I could either use Windows on my MacBooks, or access NTFS volumes. These included:

• MacFuse
• Paragon NTFS
• Parallels
• VMware Fusion

My best hunch had been that when these were un-installed, remnants related to NTFS support were left behind, and they remained embedded in the O/S.Using Terminal, I did some deep-diving, and I located the following remnants of long-uninstalled software:

• /sbin/mount_ufsd (dated from 2008)
• /sbin/newfs_ufsd (dated from 2008)
• /Library/Filesystems/fusefs.fs ) (note, this file is common between MacFuse and OSX Fuse)
• /System/Library/Filesystems/ufsd.fs

After deleting these, I subsequently restarted my MacBook Pro from its Recovery Partition, and performed a re-installation of Mac OS X as a precaution, so that any files that were native to MacOS would be re-created, if necessary.

NOTE: none of the above files were re-installed following the Mac OS X reinstallation process.

After this was completed, I restarted one more time, booting my MBP from my usual account, and used Disk Utility to repair permissions. Upon completion, I restarted one last time and found that I was finally able to mount NTFS-formatted volumes on my MacBook Pro.

I hope that this information will be useful to other Mac Users who have trouble mounting NTFS volumes on their systems.

My problem is similar and I would appreciate any help. I have a Western Digital 1TB external HDD attached to my MacBook Pro. It has an HFS partition and an NTFS partition.

I decided to upgrade to Yosemite yesterday to try and use the new Photos app instead if iPhoto - hoping I could move my photo library to my NAS and make it easier to manage around the household.

After upgrading to Yosemite yesterday the HFS partition on which my iPhoto library is stored is not mounting properly. I get the following message "OS X can't repair the disk XXXX. You can still open or copy files on the disk, but you can't save changes to files on the disk. Back up the disk and reformat it as soon as you can."

I used Disk Utility manually after the message and the Verify and Repairs failed. As noted above, the suggested remedy was to backup my files and reformat my drive.

I copied my iTunes library off my HDD onto my NAS but my iPhoto library is too large to move to my Macintosh HDD, and because the iPhoto library cannot be copied to a NAS. I am not sure what to do.

The worst case seems to be that I'd have to buy another drive, format it as HFS in Yosemite and then copy the iPhoto library over. However, I really do not need another drive so this is not something I really want to do unless I have to.

I have tried unmounting and remounting the drive multiple times both yesterday and today with the same result.

I am wondering if there is any way to repair this disk and/or what are my available options for moving my iPhoto library. It's got a lot of important family photos and I cannot just lose it.

Below is the log from Disk Utility in case it helps...

Thanks

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2015-08-23 09:26:53 -0400: Disk Utility started.

2015-08-23 09:27:07 -0400: Verifying volume “MacExt1”

2015-08-23 09:27:07 -0400: Starting verification tool:

2015-08-23 09:27:08 -0400: Verifying file system.

2015-08-23 09:27:08 -0400: Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.

2015-08-23 09:27:08 -0400: Checking extents overflow file.

2015-08-23 09:27:08 -0400: Checking catalog file.

2015-08-23 09:27:34 -0400: Invalid node structure

2015-08-23 09:27:34 -0400: The volume MacExt1 could not be verified completely.

2015-08-23 09:27:34 -0400: File system check exit code is 8.

2015-08-23 09:27:34 -0400: Error: This disk needs to be repaired. Click Repair Disk.

2015-08-23 09:27:34 -0400:

2015-08-23 09:27:34 -0400: Disk Utility stopped verifying “MacExt1”: This disk needs to be repaired. Click Repair Disk.

2015-08-23 09:28:00 -0400:

2015-08-23 09:28:23 -0400: Verify and Repair volume “MacExt1”

2015-08-23 09:28:23 -0400: Starting repair tool:

2015-08-23 09:28:24 -0400: Repairing file system.

2015-08-23 09:28:24 -0400: Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.

2015-08-23 09:28:24 -0400: Checking extents overflow file.

2015-08-23 09:28:24 -0400: Checking catalog file.

2015-08-23 09:28:53 -0400: Invalid node structure

2015-08-23 09:28:53 -0400: The volume MacExt1 could not be verified completely.

2015-08-23 09:28:53 -0400: File system check exit code is 8.

2015-08-23 09:28:53 -0400: Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.

2015-08-23 09:29:20 -0400: Error: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.

2015-08-23 09:29:20 -0400:

2015-08-23 09:29:20 -0400: Disk Utility stopped repairing “MacExt1”: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.

2015-08-23 09:29:47 -0400:

Try https://www.tuxera.com/products/tuxera-ntfs-for-mac/

it worked for me.

I had this problem, all of a sudden after having Yosemite installed for some time on a Mac Pro (Mid 2012). Drive would mount on my mac pro laptop no trouble.

Turns out that the drive will mount when plugged into the keyboard, just not the main mac USB. I'm looking into to how this might get fixed now.

Could you elaborate on "deep diving" through Terminal?

How to find the remnants?

Thanks.

I had to do a lot of online research involving search terms like "remove MacFuse", "remove Fuse from OS X", "remove ntfs-3g", etc. These were all products that I had either installed directly, or were installed when I tried VMware Fusion or Parallels.

I ultimately found two very helpful links that were applicable to my situation:

http://blog.downloadnp.com/2014/08/how-to-uninstall-macfuse-using-terminal.html

http://superuser.com/questions/101015/how-to-uninstall-paragon-ntfs-trial

Using the information in these two references, I used terminal to search for the orphaned code and remove them. After restarting my MacBook, I could mount the NTFS volumes.

Subsequently, I learned about an application named UninstallPKG from CoreCode, and it found remnants of other orphaned bits. The tool removed them all with one click. I found it to be much more efficient than using Terminal.

Thanks for your insightful review of the problem. What baffles me (and I am sure a bunch of other Apple product users) is the simple fact that Apple seems to be discounting the obvious problem related to the mounting of external drive. Each time I mount a 2 TB WD for Mac, I see the drive for about 30 secondes then it dismounts and cannot be used. Using suggested utilities and rebooting my system several times did not fix anything.

Running my music studio is becoming impossible because of the refusal of Apple to admit their OS is having a problem. Watch my comment to disappear like previous one because I am telling the truth... Come on Apple, you are better than that!

Still fighting this problem, and nothing worked UNTIL i plugged my BlackX5G external unit into my keyboard USB port.

unreal.

Unit works flawlessly on Macbook Pro, and all other externals work fine on Imac without issue... ONLY this unit will not work on usb ports, BUT using keyboard usb port works fine....sighhh

makes no sense..

I akso had the same problem....i had tried every software, every trick and every website and I was about to loose hope....

Until finally I discovered an easy n reaaaaly simple solution...

Download the original NTFS for mac OS X software from seagate's software driver support website sectiona and vola!!! It's done!

Reset SMC and PRAM fixed for me. Disk was showing up in devices, just wasn't mounting. I imagine if it doesn't show in devices, there's something deeper going on.

i had the same issue, and i found the solution

if nothing worked for you , e.g.

- safe mode unmount

- disk repair

- SMC reset etc.

then this might help you

https://youtu.be/WUlvECOpT1w