[CarpetFluff]

I have a LaCie external firewire pocket-drive which has worked fine for a year or so with a Fat32 file system (I needed to swap the drive between Mac & PC).

But now for some reason it won't mount in OS X.

Disk Utility can see the drive but do nothing but format it. Sherlock and the 'Find' utility in the Finder can see it but not search it.

Drive 10 can't see it.

Norton Disk Doctor can't see it.

It mounts under OS 9 and in Windows.

Norton on Windows can see it, says there are some library structure problems but for some bizarre XP reason (it says the drive is in use, which it isn't) can't fix it.

An even more bizarrely, an installer program in OS X told me it couldn't install to it because it was a network volume.

Is there any way to fix this? or do I have to empty it and reformat.

Thanks in advance!

[Eug]

Originally posted by CarpetFluff:

But now for some reason it won't mount in OS X.

It mounts under OS 9 and in Windows.

I had the exact same problem in OS X.1.3. Worked fine in XP. Also worked in OS 9, but OS 9 had to do a directory rebuild first to see the data properly. After the rebuild it still worked fine in XP, but it still was invisible in X. Reformat of X and of the hard drive didn't help.

I finally gave up and formatted it NTFS and now use it exclusively with the PC. I share files over the network.

I'm tempted to go out and buy Macdrive, since there are issues with FAT32 and OS X even when it is working (eg. unaccepted chars in filenames, etc.). I'm getting a laptop drive to use with a pocketdrive-like enclosure, and it would sure make my life simpler to use HFS+ on both my Mac and Windows machines.

[CarpetFluff]

Thanks,

Yeah i'll probably end up wiping the damn thing too, but it's a 40Gb drive and the PC I have access to only has usb1, the thought of watching it groan away for hours makes me feel nauseous.

A bit like watching an elephant try and push itself through a straw.

I figured there might be some kind of UNIX fairy dust that could be sprinkled on it to make it all better but it's probably hopeless.

[mwolstat]

Eug- you said you use it with your PC and share files over the network- i'm trying to do the opposite: use it with my powerbook running OS X and access it across the network on my dell (win 98). so far i haven't had any luck with this. i can get access to my home directory, and even tried putting an alias there to the firewire drive, but to no avail.

any suggestions?

[Eug]

Originally posted by CarpetFluff:
Yeah i'll probably end up wiping the damn thing too, but it's a 40Gb drive and the PC I have access to only has usb1, the thought of watching it groan away for hours makes me feel nauseous.

If it's 40 GB, Windows 2000 or above won't let you format it FAT32. Which OS?

Eug- you said you use it with your PC and share files over the network- i'm trying to do the opposite: use it with my powerbook running OS X and access it across the network on my dell (win 98). so far i haven't had any luck with this. i can get access to my home directory, and even tried putting an alias there to the firewire drive, but to no avail.

I dunno. I've never tried.

Anyways, I finally broke down and bought Macdrive for Windows, for about US$35.

I'll install it on the w/e.

[mwolstat]

hrm- i could do that, but i'd also have to get a firewire card for my dell, too. there's gotta be a configurable solution! i know it!

[baggie]

Originally posted by CarpetFluff:
I figured there might be some kind of UNIX fairy dust that could be sprinkled on it to make it all better but it's probably hopeless.

There may be Unix dust to help, but the first thing you need to do is workout why it's not mounting in the first place. I have just gone through a real ordeal with an HFS+ formatted firewire LaCie drive - it failed big time, but I managed to get the most important volume to mount and retrieve most, though not all, of the files on it.

The first thing to do is have a look at what happens when you attach the drive to your machine runing OSX.
[list=1][*]Start with your device detached from the machine.[*]Open the Terminal, and type 'ls -l /dev/disk*', without the quotes. This will show you all the drives (and partitions) attached to your machine. This list may be longer than you expect since every partition is listed including normally hidden partitions such as disk driver partitions and so on.[*]Open a new Terminal window (keep the other one around), and type 'top' without the quotes[*]Look for processes with the following names: autodiskmount, fsck (or fsck_msdos), msdos.util. You should probably only see autodiskmount (and even then only if the terminal window is tall enough to list it). If any of the others appear note the process ID from the PID column in top[*]Attach your drive in the normal way[*]Look at what chages in top after attaching the device. Quite a few things will be changing all the time, but you should focus primarily on autodiskmount, fsck (or fsck_msdos), msdos.util. In particular you should see msdos.util and fsck_msdos processes with different PIDs to those that you noted previously (if, that is, they existed previously)[*]Watch the progress of any fsck or msdos.util process. Do they appear to hang (say CPU usage remains at 0.0% for a prolonged period of time), or do they complete (disappear from top after a while)?[*]Open another Terminal window and type 'ls -l /dev/disk*', again without the quotes.[/list=1]

OK - this is all preliminary diagnosis! the two listings (ls -l...) that you ran should be different. The second one should be longer. The files listed as /dev/diskn where n is a number not listed on the original ls refer to the new drive. Note this number for later use. (N.B. If you detatch and re-attach the drive, this number is not guaranteed to remain the same, so if you ever need to know the drive number do this ls -lrt trick before and after attaching it.)

Can you let me know what happens to the processes in top that I asked you to monitor? Do you see the drive listed in /dev?

Once I know this we'll see what can be done to remedy this situation. I may not be able to help you force the drive to mount on a regular basis, but we may be able to get it to mount so that you can backup all your files on it over FW rather than USB.

[CarpetFluff]

Thanks for your response, however I wiped the drive after backing up in Windows as everything seemed hopeless.

It's still very odd, I used Disk Utility to reformat the drive to MS-DOS and it mounted fine after that but when I tried it on the PC (with no data on the drive) it wouldn't mount. I then tried formatting the drive again as MS-DOS and this time it went ahead and formatted it and it wouldn't mount on the Mac either.

Bizzarre!

I have since formatted it with HFS+ and passed the backed up data over the network (nightmarishly slow but it's there now), it mounts fine now but I'm not sure I trust this drive so I may have to ditch it and give it to a PC user who will of course expect it not to work properly anyway :o)

Thanks again for your help which I'm saving in case I have something similar occur in future, It's much appreciated!

[baggie]

No problem.

I hope you have no further problems with the drive, but i also understand how easy itis to lose trust in a drive when it plays up!