10.4: Force a volume to mount on an Intel Mac

Jul 20, '06 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: waxtrax

I have a 300GB USB 2.0 hard drive that I've been using with my Intel iMac since I got it last April. It had been working flawlessly until just a couple of days ago. All of a sudden, the drive would no longer mount, and a dialog box came up asking if I wanted to ignore, eject, or initialize the disk. If I tried to initialize the disk, or do anything at all with the Disk Utility, the command would time out with an input/output error.

I was unable to find anything regarding this issue on the web, but I did come across a great open source program called rEFIt. With rEFIt installed, I was able to boot into an EFI shell. When you boot into the shell, it lists all of the available partitions, but it lists them as blk1, blk2, blk3, etc.

After figuring out which partition it was that I was trying to work with -- in my case it ended up being blk5 -- I typed in the command mount blk5 in the shell, and it forced the volume to mount. Then when I exited the shell and booted into the Mac OS, the volume appeared as it should, and I was even able to manipulate it again in Disk Utility without any errors.

I still don't understand why this happened in the first place, but here's a little workaround.

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