[m a d r a]

OK chaps [and chapesses] here's a puzzler for you:

a while back my pismo suffered liquid [OK beer!] damgae which resulted in the I/O board needing to be replaced. after putting in the new board, everything seems hunky dory, apart from the 'scratch' partition on the hard drive [which i use for VM swapfiles] refuses to mount.

disc utility, discwarrior, techtool pro, drive 10 and diskutil run from the terminal, all give the partition in question a clean bill of health, but it simply refuses to mount - either at boot time or using any of the numerous 'mount' commands in these and other apps.

anyone got any ideas?

[obviously i'll be trying the ones which don't include the words 'reformat' , 'complete backup' or 're-install' first! ]

[Madrag]

did you format or change anything in that partition after the damage?

[m a d r a]

no. in fact i was using the drive in another pismo while waiting for the spare part to arrive. both partitions were showing up OK while the drive was in the other comp. it's only since i've put the drive back into the original pismo that i'm getting this non-mounting partition problem.

[Madrag]

have you got the chance to try it in the other pismo and see if the same happens?
This is really weird (I mean, if the whole drive wouldn't mount, then it could be related to the connections, but only a partition, that's strange)

If it works in that other Pismo, than what I suggest is (just like you wanted ) to backup the files and (whait for it), format it and re-partition...

sorry for the lack of creativity, but this should solve it for sure...

[bmhome1]

Try the freeware Mount Me 2.0.4.

[m a d r a]

Originally posted by bmhome1:
Try the freeware Mount Me 2.0.4.

nope. that didn't work either - even tho' it reported that the drive had mounted successfully.

this is the weird thing. none of the apps/utilities/CLI stuff i've tried manages to mount the partition, yet none of them generate an error either [and as i've said 'mount me' reports a successful attempt] - so it's like they <em>think</em> they have mounted the partition even when they've failed to.

most peculiar. i guess it's a b*st*rd clean install after all!

[barbarian]

I would recommend first grabbing the data off the drive. I've had tremendous success with Data Rescue X. It doesn't try to recover the disk, it just grabs the data. In my experience disk warrior, techtool, and drive 10 often just exacerbate the problem. Better to recover the data and cleanly reformat. I'm a sworn convert to Data Rescue as it has worked on drives that are physically damaged... if data is on there, this program can grab it.

[ginoledesma]

You can try this as an admin user (in the Terminal):

mount_hfs /dev/disk<number>s<partitionNo> /Volumes/<name_of_your_partition>

But if Mount Me didn't do much, I'm not sure how much this will, either.

[spauldingg]

Howdy fellow ex bloatpigger. M a d r a and madrag in the same thread. Shall wonders never cease?

Anyway, I had a similar problem with my G4. Two words:

Canned Air.

G'luck.

[CharlesS]

Um, have you tried just initializing the scratch partition? Since it's only used for VM swap files, I would guess that there wouldn't really be any important files on that partition...

[m a d r a]

Originally posted by spauldingg:
Howdy fellow ex bloatpigger. M a d r a and madrag in the same thread. Shall wonders never cease?........

hi there. what ever happened to bloatpig anyway? i came across the email correspondence a while back and went to the URLs but there was only tumbleweed to behold.

Originally posted by CharlesS:
Um, have you tried just initializing the scratch partition? Since it's only used for VM swap files, I would guess that there wouldn't really be any important files on that partition...

hi charles. yep. i've tried that. the trouble is that to format the partition, disc utility first needs to unmount it... but since the partition is already unmounted, disc utility trys to mount it first - [presumably so it can then 'unmount' it' again!] - and times out in this strange catch 22 world of it's own devising.

[m a d r a]

well, i think i've sussed this one and now my scratch partition is happily mounted and storing my vm swapfiles again. hopefully this thing'll stop running like molasses now it's got it's own dedicated swap partition back again!

the problem was with my '/etc/rc' file. i had edited that before in order to have OSX use the scratch partition for vm. part of that customisation of '/etc/rc' involved the line...

Code:
/sbin/mount_hfs /dev/disk0s7 /Volumes/scratch

... with /dev/disk0s7 being the device for the scratch partition according to OSX.

i remember reading somewhere that this 'device identifier' changes from machine to machine, so i had a sudden brainwave - "since i've replaced my I/O board [which i presume from its name interfaces with all the connected doodads on my comp] maybe the device identifier has changed too?" so i downloaded a wee thing called DiScoop from versiontracker which gives you a list of terminal style info about the partition mapping on your hard drive and found out that lo and behold 'scratch' now had a 'device identifier' of /dev/disk0s5

back into the terminal to adjust the line in '/etc/rc' to ...

Code:
/sbin/mount_hfs /dev/disk0s5 /Volumes/scratch

...followed by a quick reboot and - hooray! back in business.

let's see someone beat that for an obscure one!

[Madrag]

excelent news!
(that's one reason for not messing with the VM destination LOL!)