MP 1,1-5,1 Missing Volume on internal drive on High Sierra

[deckard666]

Had an odd one today on my cMP 2010 - My Bay 3 drive was just not there (its a 4TB audio sample storage disk), at all. It showed in the shortcuts on Finder but wouldn't do anything and then after playing with Disk Utility and About this mac more zero, almost like it had been completely removed from my Mac.

I opened up the door and swapped it out to an external drive which my mac was then happy to see so I thought "bad news" - How do I get my Bay 3 Sata sled mechanism fixed as that must be the problem but lets try a reboot first. Rebooted and its back fine and been fine for the last hour or so. Any thoughts ?

 

[AidenShaw]

Had an odd one today on my cMP 2010 - My Bay 3 drive was just not there (its a 4TB audio sample storage disk), at all. It showed in the shortcuts on Finder but wouldn't do anything and then after playing with Disk Utility and About this mac more zero, almost like it had been completely removed from my Mac.

I opened up the door and swapped it out to an external drive which my mac was then happy to see so I thought "bad news" - How do I get my Bay 3 Sata sled mechanism fixed as that must be the problem but lets try a reboot first. Rebooted and its back fine and been fine for the last hour or so. Any thoughts ?

The disk may have crashed. Not the heads and platters, but the operating system (firmware) running the drive. It may have hung, panicked, or just got confused.

A hard power cycle gets it going again, a reboot might not be enough.

High end enterprise RAID arrays will often include logic to power-cycle a disk that has disappeared as a recovery tactic. If it comes back, the array will be rebuilt without any error messages. (The controller will keep a count of power resets, so if a disk is having repeated hangs it will be put in a permanent error state.)

My advice would be to check the disk with a good disk diagnostic, and if it looks good just keep an eye on it. Check to see if updated firmware is available for the drive.

If it has errors, copy your data to a new drive ASAP.

 

[deckard666]

An update -and not a good one

Yesterday i had to restart my Mac and it took ages which is unusual as some time ago I replaced the top front optical drive with 1/2TB SSD drive, needless to say that has vanished now too and it was using my Carbon Copy Clone to boot from a partition on bay 4.

I am suspicious that these are related.

I haven’t yet gone and powered down the Mac since the SSD has vanished and pulled everything out for a clean and a test which I will try to do today. At least as I type this it all works albeit slowly ! I never appreciated the in-use boot speed of apps on SSD!

I did google and see this -

"If anyone else is having this problem, here is something you can try. Remove the first two hard drives from the bays. Remove the heatsink cover and fan assembly. This will expose the hdd connections to the logic board (next to sata extension plugs). Check to see if they are pushed in all of the way. Mine was slightly loose on one corner of the plug. I pushed the connections down tightly onto the board and reassembled. Fired it up and the drive appeared. Works like a charm. Sure beats paying hundreds of dollars to have a repair person diagnose it. Took me about 20-25 minutes to fix myself.”

Which could be a route after I’ve checked over the drives, cables etc but Im not sure I would be happy with my tech skills going that far…

Any thoughts ? I have mailed a few of the local mac shops to see if they could help and as a last resort as I am back up in Bristol in a few weeks I could take the tower up there as I know 2 "hardcore" mac repair guys there from when I lived there years ago.