Invisible External Hard Drive

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Level 1

139 points

Invisible External Hard Drive

I have 2 accounts on my Mac and wanted to hide my music external hard drive with files on it from the second account. I got info and in ownership and permissions opted to hide the drive, to prevent my children accessing the drive. I thought I would hide the drives from my secondary account and that I would have the drives mount on my desktop as usual. Not so. Now I can not access my drive, Disk Utility sees it, but I can not access and no icon mounts on the desktop. Completely invisible. iTunes will not play music as it can't see the folder. Is there anway of reversing this without having to format my drives and loose all my data. Any help would be appreciated. I know there is a terminal command for making the drive visible again. Thank you.

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.4.4)

Posted on May 11, 2007 8:36 AM

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Answer 1

May 11, 2007 9:56 AM in response to Cyberped

Hi

Try this:

In Terminal, issue the following commands (on separate lines).

cd /Volumes
ls -al

Do you see your drive there? If so, what is the sequence of letters at the front of its line (something like "drwxr-xr-x")?

Matt

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Answer 2

Cyberped Author

Level 1

139 points

May 11, 2007 10:21 AM in response to Matt Clifton

Hi,

the info it gives is as follows:

drwxrwxrwt 5 root admin 170 May 11 18:17 .
drwxrwxr-t 31 root admin 1156 May 11 17:06 ..
d---r-x--- 13 leo leo 544 May 9 20:04 MuZic
drwxr-xr-x 4 imac imac 238 Oct 12 2006 Quake4Mac1.3
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 1 May 11 17:06 iMac -> /

Thank you for your help.

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Answer 3

May 11, 2007 10:29 AM in response to Cyberped

Hi

Is "MuZic" your hidden drive? If so, issue this command:

chmod 777 /Volumes/MuZic

(If that doesn't allow you to do it, use "sudo chmod 777 MuZic" and enter your admin password when prompted).

That should open the permissions right up again. You may need to log out and in (or restart) to see the drive.

Matt

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Answer 4

Cyberped Author

Level 1

139 points

May 11, 2007 10:42 AM in response to Matt Clifton

Hi

thanks, but it hasn't worked.

Welcome to Darwin!
imac:~ imac$ chmod 777 /Volumes/MuZic
chmod: /Volumes/MuZic: Operation not permitted
imac:~ imac$ sudo chmod 777 MuZic

WARNING: Improper use of the sudo command could lead to data loss
or the deletion of important system files. Please double-check your
typing when using sudo. Type "man sudo" for more information.

chmod: MuZic: No such file or directory
imac:~ imac$ sudo chmod 777 MuZic
chmod: MuZic: No such file or directory
imac:~ imac$

The drive is called MuZic and info gives Mount Point : /Volumes/MuZic

Does this mean it will not mount?

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Answer 5

May 11, 2007 10:46 AM in response to Cyberped

Sorry, I meant to give you this one:

sudo chmod 777 /Volumes/MuZic

does that work?

Matt

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Answer 6

Cyberped Author

Level 1

139 points

May 11, 2007 10:55 AM in response to Matt Clifton

PHEW!!!!

Thanks mate, that worked a treat 🙂

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Answer 7

digimont

Level 1

9 points

Jun 27, 2007 5:24 AM in response to Matt Clifton

Hi Matt, I have the same problem but I have the Hard Drive Internal
(I use it for audio recording). I follow the steeps you post but
it's not working for me.
This is the info that Terminal shows after the cd /Volumes and ls -al commands:

drwxrwxrwt 9 root admin 306 Jun 27 07:17 .
drwxrwxr-t 38 root admin 1326 Jun 27 07:15 ..
-rwxrwxrwx 1 amauri_m amauri_m 82 Nov 22 2006 ._AMAURI MONT
-rwxrwxrwx 1 amauri_m amauri_m 82 Nov 23 2006 ._iPod
-rwxrwxrwx 1 amauri_m amauri_m 82 Nov 23 2006 ._m
d---r-xr-x 77 amauri_m amauri_m 2720 Jun 25 21:02 Audio HD
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 1 Jun 27 07:15 Macintosh HD -> /
drwxrwxrwx 1 amauri_m amauri_m 2048 Jun 18 11:04 amauri_montalvo
drwx------ + 32 amauri_m amauri_m 1122 Jun 27 07:17 iDisk
c-76-23-207-248:/Volumes amauri_montalvo$

The invisible one is Audio HD

Then I type this in Terminal : "sudo chmod 777 /Volumes/Audio HD"
and I get this:

chmod: /Volumes/Audio: No such file or directory
chmod: HD: No such file or directory
c-76-23-207-248:/Volumes amauri_montalvo$

Could you please help me?

Power Mac G5 Dual 2.0 GHz Mac OS X (10.4.8)

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