Mounting external firewire drive.

[switchingGeek]

A friend of mine with a Win XP laptop purchased a external firewire400/USB 2.0 enclosure and put a Maxtor 80GB HDD in it. He formatted it in FAT32, and put some files on it.

It promptly stopped working a while after that. My suspicion is that the formatting has gone awry. Unfortunately I am unable to mount it or even see the HDD on my PB 12" 1GHz.

When I connect it by USB, I get USB storage device detected on "about this mac". But the HDD does not appear anywhere.

When I connect it to firewire, same thing happens. I get firewire device detected, but no further activity.

Does any one have any solutions?

I wouldn't mind if I could format the disk either.

 

[pepeleuepe]

This might be a stupid thing to ask. But have you tried to see if it shows up in Disk Utility (its located in /Applications/Utilities). If it shows up there, you should be able to format it. If not, I'm stumped

Hope this helps

 

[switchingGeek]

This might be a stupid thing to ask. But have you tried to see if it shows up in Disk Utility (its located in /Applications/Utilities). If it shows up there, you should be able to format it. If not, I'm stumped

Hope this helps

Sorry, should have mentioned that I tried that. Didn't work :-(.

If there is any way I can see the disk, and format it, I'd be fine. Any command line utisl would also be fine. Actually, any windows utils would also be fine :-D

 

[IndyGopher]

A friend of mine with a Win XP laptop purchased a external firewire400/USB 2.0 enclosure and put a Maxtor 80GB HDD in it. He formatted it in FAT32, and put some files on it.

It promptly stopped working a while after that. My suspicion is that the formatting has gone awry. Unfortunately I am unable to mount it or even see the HDD on my PB 12" 1GHz.

When I connect it by USB, I get USB storage device detected on "about this mac". But the HDD does not appear anywhere.

When I connect it to firewire, same thing happens. I get firewire device detected, but no further activity.

Does any one have any solutions?

I wouldn't mind if I could format the disk either.

I am curious how he formatted an 80Gig drive with FAT32 under XP. Without third party software or monkeying about, any drive greater than 32Gig should only list NTFS as an option. Format the drive NTFS and see if the problm goes away.

 

[switchingGeek]

I am curious how he formatted an 80Gig drive with FAT32 under XP. Without third party software or monkeying about, any drive greater than 32Gig should only list NTFS as an option. Format the drive NTFS and see if the problm goes away.

Heh, there are 4 partitions, 20 GB each, FAT 32. Specifically to avoid having to put it as NTFS. Is there any way I can change or reset the partition table?

 

[gbojim]

Heh, there are 4 partitions, 20 GB each, FAT 32. Specifically to avoid having to put it as NTFS. Is there any way I can change or reset the partition table?

There are command line utils with OSX, but if Disk Utility won't see it, I highly doubt any other software will either since the drive itself has to be recognized and the driver loaded by the OS before you can work on it.

 

[switchingGeek]

There are command line utils with OSX, but if Disk Utility won't see it, I highly doubt any other software will either since the drive itself has to be recognized and the driver loaded by the OS before you can work on it.

Well the drive is kind of recognized - the system profiler says USB Mass storage device, and the firewire portion says "firewire 400 device".

I tried df, and of course it wasn't mounted. Is there any way, I can force the device to mount, and/or mount it myself?

The system log says -
Mar 4 20:31:29 localhost kernel: USB2.0 Storage Device: family specific matching fails
Mar 4 20:31:29 localhost last message repeated 15 times
Mar 4 20:31:29 localhost kernel: com_isd_driver_CYMSC_Device:robe(IOUSBInterface)
Mar 4 20:31:29 localhost kernel: com_isd_driver_CYMSC_Device::start(IOUSBInterface) <1>

Perhaps I should try on the apple.com help?

 

[gbojim]

Well the drive is kind of recognized - the system profiler says USB Mass storage device, and the firewire portion says "firewire 400 device".

A connected device is being recognized, but not that the device is a HDD. You don't actually mount the drive - you mount the file system(s) formatted on the drive.

When a disk loads successfully, the OS assigns each partition to a directory entry, eg /dev/disk0s9 - disk0 is the device and s9 is the partition. Firewire and USB drives are configured to automount which means each partition will be mounted and show up as a volume in the finder.

From the error messages, it looks like the Mac is able to talk to the firewire and USB controllers on the drive interface, but when the device is asked to identify itself, it is unable to do so. My guess is either the controller on the HDD itself or the controller in the enclosure died.