Oct 14, '03 10:42:00AM • Contributed by: Anonymous
This tip comes with no guarantees, but should be worth a try given the usage circumstances.
I recently ran into a problem with a partition on one of my drives that reported a bad block. Running Disk Utility or fsck_hfs from the command line couldn't fix the problem, and the OS refused to mount the partition. I don't have Norton or other disk utilities, so I was almost resigned to the idea that the data was gone and I was about to re-format the partition. Before this, though, I thought it was worth forcing a manual mount ... and it worked!
First you need to know the filesytem device for the drive. In my case it was on an external firewire drive (/dev/disk1s12). You can probably guess by typing df in terminal and looking for the next or missing device in the listed sequence. Then all you need to do is to type the following in terminal:
% sudo mkdir /Volumes/broken % sudo mount -t hfs /dev/disk1s12 /Volumes/brokenThe first line creates the mount point; the second line mounts the drive - you should substitute for the correct device for /dev/disk1s12, of course.
That's it! If the mount is successful, you should be able to see the partition. It took a while for the Finder to recognise the mount, but it did so eventually. I copied the data to a safe location from the command line with ditto, then erased and restored the drive partition.
