Hello all! The last time I unplugged my external media hard drive, I did it while the Mac was asleep and the indicator light on the drive was off. I didn't think that this would constitute an "improper" eject, but sure enough the next time I woke the Mac I had the notification that I hadn't ejected the drive properly. Oh well.
Flash forward to me using the drive for the next time, earlier this evening. I plug it in and... it didn't mount. Start sweating a bit. Open Disk Utility and it shows that the main (and only) volume on the disk is not mounted. Click "Mount" and get the following error (excuse me taking a phone photo of my screen and not a proper screenshot):
Oddly, it seemed to have actually mounted fine. It appeared in the Finder sidebar, and as mounted in disk utility. I then Ejected it, and plugged it back in to see if it would mount normally now which it seems to.
It occurred to me that the reason it didn't automatically mount promptly the first time was likely because macOS was running fsck on the drive following the original "bad eject," but I didn't have the thought to check in activity monitor to see if that's what was causing it to not be mounted originally.
I have a backup of this drive, but I decided to run First Aid in Disk Utility at the volume level and then the disk level (the order recommended by Apple) out of an abundance of caution. Here are the blow-by-blows for the two First Aid runs (again, excuse the phone photos instead of screenshots):
"Trove" is the volume. "WD My Passport 260F Media" is the disk. I just have a couple of questions about First Aid's output.
First, when scanning the volume the first line is "Repairing file system." Does that mean that there was an issue that did in fact require repair, or is that just basically saying "starting the process to check for issues"?
Second question, when scanning at the disk level it "checked all HFS data partition loader spaces" even though there are no HFS partitions on the drive - what's that about?
Thanks in advance for any help you all are able to provide. In the future if a drive doesn't mount quickly, I'll see if fsck is hogging it before trying to forcefully mount in Disk Utility.
Flash forward to me using the drive for the next time, earlier this evening. I plug it in and... it didn't mount. Start sweating a bit. Open Disk Utility and it shows that the main (and only) volume on the disk is not mounted. Click "Mount" and get the following error (excuse me taking a phone photo of my screen and not a proper screenshot):
Oddly, it seemed to have actually mounted fine. It appeared in the Finder sidebar, and as mounted in disk utility. I then Ejected it, and plugged it back in to see if it would mount normally now which it seems to.
It occurred to me that the reason it didn't automatically mount promptly the first time was likely because macOS was running fsck on the drive following the original "bad eject," but I didn't have the thought to check in activity monitor to see if that's what was causing it to not be mounted originally.
I have a backup of this drive, but I decided to run First Aid in Disk Utility at the volume level and then the disk level (the order recommended by Apple) out of an abundance of caution. Here are the blow-by-blows for the two First Aid runs (again, excuse the phone photos instead of screenshots):
"Trove" is the volume. "WD My Passport 260F Media" is the disk. I just have a couple of questions about First Aid's output.
First, when scanning the volume the first line is "Repairing file system." Does that mean that there was an issue that did in fact require repair, or is that just basically saying "starting the process to check for issues"?
Second question, when scanning at the disk level it "checked all HFS data partition loader spaces" even though there are no HFS partitions on the drive - what's that about?
Thanks in advance for any help you all are able to provide. In the future if a drive doesn't mount quickly, I'll see if fsck is hogging it before trying to forcefully mount in Disk Utility.
