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Level 1

3 points

Hard drive will not mount shows up in Disk Utility

I have an external drive with a bootable OS X 10.6.8. I was in a transition between building up a SSD swapped drive. The SSD is installed in the CPU box but I have my old installation running from an external.

I have several external hard drives. They are all Firewire. Some have USB 3.0 and or eSATA options but my MacMini only talks to Firewire and USB 2.0.

I understand that you daisy chain Firewire drives and turn them on and off in sequence as they fall from the CPU box/case.

Firewire is a power source. I run the external with the OS using an AC adapter but one Firewire drive is powered through Firewire.

I have had as many as 4 external drives running along with the internal drive without a glitch while I was reorganizing files.

Today I booted off the external drive. It was running fine. I turned on one Firewire drive (the one that runs on Firewire power). That drive stumbled. I recognized the sound when there is an interruption in power. This cause the external boot drive to stall. I had to force a reboot.

Now the external boot drive will not boot up. It does not mount but Disk Utility sees it. The drive itself is bright and clear in Disk Utility but the partition (single) is faded out. I can run Verify and repair in DU. DU says it doesn't see anything to repair. It will not mount on its own or when I click the Mount button in DU. It does not produce an icon on the Desktop (because it is not mounting).

I also have SpeedTools. But although it sees the drive I cannot do anything with it. None of its tools run more than a spli second before they fail.

This drive has USB 3.0 and I see everything through USB that I see through Firewire. Connecting the other way did not get around the problem.

Of course I will buy an AC adapter for every external drive and never run them using Firewire again but the horse is out of the barn.

I have the original installation disks and could run the Archive and Install option but it would require physically swapping drives with the internal. I'd like to avoid it if possible. It is a MacMini and tedious.

Any suggestions?

Mac mini (Mid 2010), Mac OS X (10.6.8), 2.4ghz 8GB RAM SSD Hard drive

Posted on Feb 20, 2015 7:11 PM

18 replies

ms_triple Author

Level 1

3 points

Feb 25, 2015 8:49 PM in response to ms_triple

Update: The software is actually called Data Resue and it was a piece of cake recovering everything I needed.

I read that some of these programs rename the recovered files but Data Rescue even saved the directory path from which they were stored on the source drive. All you have to do is open two Finder windows and navigate to the section on your boot drive if you want to replace a file to update the program with lost information. This is particularly helpful because there are at least two Library folders and Preference folders.

I was worried that iCal files would be the most difficult to recover. I have documented some events regarding something very important and also had a journal going written with Mellel. I was pretty sure the Mellel files would be easy to find on the Desktop but iCal is cryptic. At the least I have the individual iCal date events that I can open and add one by one. It would be the safest approach because it is not clear which files simply restore everything from a previous iCal database. I did not export an up to the last day archive file.

Thank you Eric Root and Drew Reece for the assistance!

Drew Reece

Level 6

10,660 points

Feb 25, 2015 11:12 PM in response to ms_triple

That is great news you managed to get the data back,

Well done 🙂

The way the repair completed suggests that the disk catalog was fixed – you got folders & filenames. Personally I'd find a new disk incase this one falls over again, but there is a chance it is OK now.

Cograts on being persistent & getting it back.

pratik3p

Level 1

9 points

May 1, 2017 11:57 AM in response to ms_triple

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

Hard drive will not mount shows up in Disk Utility