Issues with External Hard Drives in Mountain Lion!

[thirteenthree]

Just to chime in here, when I select the option to encrypt my TM backups, I mount the volume successfully and perform a full backup.

-but- subsequent times I plug in the TM disk it asks for the password, and declines what I enter.

In desperation I changed it to my FirstnameLastname so I could be positive I had it right, and had the same issue. I've used diskutil to erase the volumes and remove the password several times with the same result.

Tonight I am going to pull the external drive out of its housing (its 2.5" sata) and put it in a spare Thinkpad, because im going to run DBAN (Destructive Boot And Nuke) on the darn thing and try it all one more time.

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I was also experiencing a multi day backup with Time Machine on a Passport Essential external drive for 170GB. I downloaded for free (a request for a donation appears, which you can decide on later); it works beautifully and my 170GB backed up in 90 minutes on my Passport Essential. I'll make the donation. IBackup appears to be very clean. I'll wait till Apple cleans up the problem with Time Machine backups, but Ibackup is a great alternative.

Not a bad suggestion. I am happy with Crashplan Pro, but I still want an encrypted hard copy

 

[DavidRavenMoon]

My issue isn't really the same but since my ML upgrade my time machine backups have been painfully slow over what is meant to be a fast USB3 connection...

Me too! It was running great, but then got to the point where the hourly backups took so long that it hadn't backed up anything in two days!

The trick to fix it is supposed to be deleting your Spotlight index and letting it rebuild. That can take hours.

I ended up having to delete my backups and starting over, and it's going to take 10 days to back up 579GBs!

Clearly something is broken.

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Ever since Mountain Lion, my external hard drive's permissions have prevented me from doing anything without typing a password. I don't want to have to reformat it.

Make sure the checkbox "Shared folder" is not checked. This happened to me yesterday. It made the disk read only to me.

Then while in the Get Info window, click the padlock, type in your password, and then click the box "Ignore ownership on this volume" at the bottom of the window.

Also if that doesn't work, uncheck that box, change the permissions, and then check it again.

 

[charlieegan3]

Me too! It was running great, but then got to the point where the hourly backups took so long that it hadn't backed up anything in two days!

The trick to fix it is supposed to be deleting your Spotlight index and letting it rebuild. That can take hours.

I ended up having to delete my backups and starting over, and it's going to take 10 days to back up 579GBs!

Clearly something is broken

Mine still go really slow.

 

[DavidRavenMoon]

Mine still go really slow.

Yeah, it didn't fix mine either. I'm tempted to start over with Carbon Copy Cloner. I was going to do that, but it was going to take 6 days.

 

[curmudgeon32]

Not sure if this is related, but I've been having a lot of trouble with a File Vault encrypted FireWire drive too. I just got this drive a couple days ago, and it has all of my iTunes music and videos on it.

I have several user accounts on my machine, and I found that if I logged into a user account (say, the one I have for guests) that did not have the password for the drive saved in the keychain, it was causing a hard freeze. Instead of just asking for the password, it was freezing. I figured this out because if I logged into that account without the FireWire drive connected, everything was fine.

If I logged into my main account, where the password was saved, it wasn't really a problem.

Anyway, since there's nothing really sensitive on this drive (just music and video) I turned off Filevault encryption, and hopefully that will clear up problems.

 

[williemyers]

sort of tagging along here, but I've just connected an external 2TB drive (with 4 partitions) via FW400 to my MacPro 8-core.
I've got 2 boot partitions - - booting in 10.6.8, the external shows up instantly on my desktop....booting in 10.8.2, the external takes 80-90 sec. to mount. TM is OFF, Spotlight is OFF, let drives sleep is OFF.
hmmm....

 

[mschmalenbach]

My external drives are also taking longer to mount - most noticeable since updating to 10.8.3.

And I'm getting a LOT of disk thrashing - over a period of 2 days Activity told me my MacBook Pro 7,1 had READ nearly 19Tb of data - I only have about 2.5Tb on my internal & 2 external drives!

 

[mmatyas]

10.8 with LaCie FW800 ext

I used to mount 5 partitions on an external 2 GB LaCie FW800 drive under 10.7 without problem. Coincidental with move to 10.8, I have applications hang and extremely slow GUI response when the drive is mounted - but not always. Usually after the drive has been mounted a while and the machine has gone to sleep for some period. Upon wake, screen saver password is very slow and I get pinwheel when trying to access already launched apps - including Finder. if I unplug FW drive, things usually come back if I do it right away.

I run Time Machine to a Time Capsule and that runs fine. The hang problem occurs even if nothing is accessing any of the FW mounted volumes. I have disabled spotlight and virus checking on external volumes.

UPDATE: Go to http://www.lacie.com/support/drivers/driver.htm?id=10250 and download the LaCie Mac firmware updater app. Update the LaCie firmware to get rid of "ECO Mode" and everything is good again.

 

[larsonbp]

Issues with External Hard Drives in Mountain Lion!

Hi there, just wanted to add what's been happening with me.

2008 Model Mac Pro desktop with Mountain Lion.

Bought this machine used recently and everything was great for a few weeks.
Was putting off transferring all my old files from the last computer until a few weeks ago. Old computer didn't have Firewire 800, but my Lacie external HD did so I thought "hey I'll start using the Firewire 800 port".

Anyways this is when my problems started (It took my about 2 weeks to realize it though, I hadn't made the connection initially that it started as soon as I connected the external HD).

What started happening was the computer would turn on and keyboard and mouse would be unresponsive. I could see the desktop, I could move the cursor, but if I clicked anything nothing would happen. I even restarted in safe mode and the same thing happens (actually couldn't log on, because I couldn't type the admin password due to keyboard being non-responsive).
This had been happening for a couple weeks (not every time about 50% of the time I would say). If it did happen I would just wait about 10 minutes and then everything is back to normal.

Anyways, just made the connection a couple days ago that it has to do with using Firewire 800. The computer had went to sleep, woke it back up, started itunes and tried to play a file (all my music is on the external HD) and as soon as I tried, finder is not responding. I try force quitting and restarting it but no go. I restart the computer but it gets hung up on the grey screen right before you see the apple logo. I try hard booting again and same thing. Meanwhile I'm noticing that my external is spinning pretty hard and doesn't stop even when computer is shut off. So I turn it off and disconnect it. Now it starts up just fine.

I switched the external to using USB instead of Firewire and no problems since. I would love to use the Firewire though.....

 

[Brewyet]

Hi there! I need some help!! I know this is an old thread, but, I JUST switched over to ML from Snow Leopard on my 2 MBP's. I have a Raidon RAID drive that I have been using for several years. After upgrading the OS, I plugged in the raid drive with the firewire cable like I've been doing for years....I almost **** myself. LOL. At first it did nothing! Then, It was SLOW! Like unusable. I started doing research and happened upon this thread and others. I found that using USB works fine on both lapotops. And, my iMac (still running Snow Leopard) works fine with Firewire.

I also have a fairly new WD My passport FW portable drive. It works fine and is very fast on the Laptops.

Has anyone discovered why this happens with the RAID drives? Is it due to the firewire controller in the raid drive having an incompatibility issue with ML? I wish they would just get along!

I need to purchase another raid drive asap. I don't want to get another one that won't work with the firewire. I'm so bummed. I was fat, dumb, and happy with Snow Leopard......I should have NEVER upgraded. :-(

 

[zhenya]

Have you checked for a firmware update for your drive from the manufacturer? LaCie eventually released one for my drive and it has been fine since.

 

[Brewyet]

Have you checked for a firmware update for your drive from the manufacturer? LaCie eventually released one for my drive and it has been fine since.

Thanks! I tried emailing Raidon about this twice, but, no reply. There is nothing on their website either. Def not going back with this same company. :-(

 

[aaronnandi]

Problem resolved

Just wanted to post this for anyone else who may, like me, stumble upon this thread with the same problem. Anytime my external drive was connected via USB3, it would freeze the whole system up with the spinning wheel and the only thing that would fix it is to disconnect the drive and reboot. Others have posted the same problem. I did like the others suggested with their LaCie drives and downloaded the Seagate firmware updater and updated the firmware on my external drive. My problem was immediately resolved and I'm currently in the middle of the first time machine backup that I've done in over 6 months because of this problem.

Thanks to those that posted their solutions. Hopefully this helps others as well.

 

[djjoshuacarl]

Hey Gents,

I also would like to throw some data your way as Im experiencing this, but in a different fashion.

Im a video DJ and I use a Seagate 1.5 tb FW800 drive
I had been on Snow Leopard with this configuration since 2010 (i7 17" MBP)
I upgraded (eheeemmmm) to Mountain Lion finally, last month.

now, for us, using external hard drives requires a few steps, IE proper formating of the drive, ensuring the sleep function is off, ect ect
ya know for the best performace, HD viceo run 100-250 mb and they are constantly being pinged and loaded into the software, in this case Serato Scratch Live and Mix Emergency.

the way I stumbled across this is a bit odd.
when in the Software you can delete files two ways
a. Ctrl + Delete = Deletion from the software only
b ctrl + shift + Delete = Deletion from the software, and from storage (and shown immediatly with the deleted file in the trash)

one day, I was deleteing some duplicates and such... and they would not delete off the external harddrive. (but the same files, copies of them WOULD delete off the internal, which screamed at me permissions)
i found a handful of users all with the same problem, and none reached an actual solution.

I brought the problem to their tech support and we went back and forth with some ideas, and they pointed me here.
Ironically in trying to figure all this out, I wasnt able to figure out what solved the deleting issie, I changed permissions, checked sleep. re-wrote database files.... but the final move was a re-installation of the software.

which i know, doesent really make sense, unless when re-installing a new handshake between the software and the OS was created.
seeig how I upgraded, and did NOT do a fresh install of ML Im wondering if the software that did not have a ML upgrade AFTER the installation might be stalling with outdated permissions from the prior OS?

if you couldnt figure it out, Im the worst sort of user.... knows just enough to cause a problem....lol.

thanks fellas.