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Mount un-mountable external Firewire drives
Authored by: bluehz on Feb 06, '04 01:36:38PM

Oh how I was hoping this would work!

I have a 30G external firewire drive in one of those small VST enclosures. Worked fine in OS X until one day I plugged it in to an OS 9 machine and the OS 9 box crashed. When the OS 9 box came around - the drive was unmountable. Have tried EVERYTHING for the last few months and nothing will revive the drive. Or should I say - I can;t even get the drive to show up so I can reformat it, repair it or anything. I have run the gamut of DiskUtility, DiskWarrior, DiskRescueX, and Drive 10 and NOTHING will mount or act on the drive. I have even tried a few things in the terminal - I can occasionally see the device show up in the df listing in the terminal.

I am not even worried about the contents of the drive - I just want my 30G back. Does anyone know of a method to reformat the drive from the terminal or some other trick?



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Disk Utility?
Authored by: notmatt on Feb 06, '04 01:57:29PM

If you can mount it, you don't even need the terminal. Just open Disk Utility (in /Applications/Utilities) and click on the "Erase" tab.



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Disk Utility?
Authored by: bluehz on Feb 06, '04 02:46:37PM

Disk utility freezes for me while the drive is plugged in...



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Mount un-mountable external Firewire drives
Authored by: diamondsw on Feb 06, '04 03:21:45PM

If you can get it to show up in df, you may have a chance. Try the following (this is from memory, so I hope I recall it all):

From the terminal, run the system disk mounter script:
sudo /Systen/Library/StartupItems/Disks/Disks

This *might* mount the disk into the filesystem. In my case it did, but the drive would not show up on the desktop, and it locked up disk utilities. However, it was mounted. Try this:
cd /Volumes/; ls

If it's there, copy everything off using:
ditto --rsrc /Volumes/<yourvolume>/* <wherever>

Good luck!



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Mount un-mountable external Firewire drives
Authored by: tupholme on Feb 07, '04 12:20:53PM

I had the same problem with a LaCie 42GB drive under OS 9 - I bought it very early on and I think the drivers were sub-standard.

Nothing would work on the Mac but when I plugged the drive into my Sony VAIO (onboard FireWire), I was able to see it. Of course, it wasn't readable but I could re-format it. When I then plugged it back into the Mac, it was visible. I needed to re-format again to make it HFS, but the process made the disk usable again and it has been fine ever since (I used the Heat drivers under OS 9 after that!).

Hope you've got a friend with a FireWire-equipped PC!


Jeff



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