Travel Technology - vanishing external drive on Mac

I have a macbook running Mac OS X V 10.5.5 and the strangest thing has started happening. I keep my Itunes files on an external Western Digital drive as my Itunes library is waaay to big to keep on the internal drive and lately, I've noticed that I can no longer see the external Western Digital drive in finder or on the desktop. Itunes sees it with no problem, but Finder doesn't see it, so I can't access any of the other files on the drive.

When I bring up the Disk Utilitity on the Mac, it sees the drive, when I plug the drive into a Windows machine, explorer sees it with no problem, but Finder is blind to it.

I'm stumped.....

Hmmm, a few things come to mind:

1. If this is a USB external drive, and if you're running parallels desktop, perhaps it's gotten a hold of your hard drive instead of OSX.

2. Go into your Force Quit Applications window (press Command+Option+Escape keys), and relaunch your Finder.

3. If neither of these, does a reboot of the computer resolve the problem?

Arthur

I have a macbook running Mac OS X V 10.5.5 and the strangest thing has started happening. I keep my Itunes files on an external Western Digital drive as my Itunes library is waaay to big to keep on the internal drive and lately, I've noticed that I can no longer see the external Western Digital drive in finder or on the desktop. Itunes sees it with no problem, but Finder doesn't see it, so I can't access any of the other files on the drive.

When I bring up the Disk Utilitity on the Mac, it sees the drive, when I plug the drive into a Windows machine, explorer sees it with no problem, but Finder is blind to it.

since the drive works in itunes and disk utility but not finder, it sounds like it's a finder issue. does it show up in a finder window (as opposed to the desktop)? in the general panel of finder preferences, is external disks in the show these items on the desktop section checked?

a couple of thoughts....

have you tried zapping the pram (restart while holding down the command-option-p-r keys until you hear the 3rd restart chime)

have you tried to repair your permissions by starting from your osx cd/dvd and running the disk utility from there (some fncns of disk utility are either disabled or "work funny" if running from the internal h/d as your startup disk)

UScolorado1k,

I am assuming the external drive is connected to your MacBook via USB or FireWire. If this is the case, please type the command

df -hl

in a UNIX shell (launch /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app to get a shell).

What is the output of the above command?

Again in a shell, while the external drive is NOT connected, type the command

ls -l /Volumes

and post the output.

UScolorado1k,

I am assuming the external drive is connected to your MacBook via USB or FireWire. If this is the case, please type the command

df -hl

in a UNIX shell (launch /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app to get a shell).

What is the output of the above command?



the output is:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2 186Gi 94Gi 92Gi 51% /
/dev/disk1s1 298Gi 237Gi 61Gi 80% /Volumes/WD 320
/dev/disk2s2 9.1Mi 6.6Mi 2.5Mi 73% /Volumes/Growl-1.1.4
/dev/disk3s2 11Mi 9.8Mi 960Ki 92% /Volumes/GmailStatus


note: the /Volumes/WD 320 is the external that I can't see via finder. The interesting thing is that when I unplug the drive from the USB slot with the OS running, I get an "unsafe removal" message...



Again in a shell, while the external drive is NOT connected, type the command

ls -l /Volumes

and post the output.

The output is:

drwxr-xr-x 4 bozotheclown admin 136 Jul 26 18:58 Bobit
drwxr-xr-x 7 bozotheclown bozotheclown 306 Nov 20 2007 GmailStatus
drwxr-xr-x 11 bozotheclown bozotheclown 442 Jun 18 03:15 Growl-1.1.4
drwxr-xr-x 3 bozotheclown admin 102 May 22 2007 MSHOME;LS-GLEA5
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 1 Dec 5 04:53 Macintosh HD -> /

a couple of thoughts....

have you tried zapping the pram (restart while holding down the command-option-p-r keys until you hear the 3rd restart chime)

have you tried to repair your permissions by starting from your osx cd/dvd and running the disk utility from there (some fncns of disk utility are either disabled or "work funny" if running from the internal h/d as your startup disk)

I will give this a shot if nothing else works...

since the drive works in itunes and disk utility but not finder, it sounds like it's a finder issue. does it show up in a finder window (as opposed to the desktop)? in the general panel of finder preferences, is external disks in the show these items on the desktop section checked?

Yes, I have "show external disks" checked. I have a La Cie drive plugged into the FW slot, and that shows up in Finder.

Hmmm, a few things come to mind:

1. If this is a USB external drive, and if you're running parallels desktop, perhaps it's gotten a hold of your hard drive instead of OSX.

2. Go into your Force Quit Applications window (press Command+Option+Escape keys), and relaunch your Finder.

3. If neither of these, does a reboot of the computer resolve the problem?

Arthur


Nope, this doesn't fix it.

The interesting thing is that sometimes if I try to boot my machine with the drive plugged in, the machine won't boot and I get the ??? on the screen. As soon as I unplug the drive and boot, it works fine.

Zap the PRAM (by holding down command+option+P+R as the computer restarts)

and rebuild the desktop (by holding down command+option as the computer starts up).

Zap the PRAM (by holding down command+option+P+R as the computer restarts)

and rebuild the desktop (by holding down command+option as the computer starts up).does rebuilding the desktop still work under osx (10.4/tiger and 10.5 leopard)? for some reason, i thought t didn't (i haven't tried it since i went to tiger and then to leopard)

I had this happen on two WD external drives, one on Firewire, the other on USB. I keep my iMac Itunes library and iPhoto library on an external drive as well to avoid problems if the primary in system drive fails (I then also backup that drive to another same drive every week)

Disk Utility showed no device plugged in sometimes, the other times Mac OS X wasn't auto mounting the drive file system.

Reboot the system normally corrected it. I normally had the drives disconnected on reboot and connected after boot.

This was really bad before 10.5.3 - if a reboot happened the drives would randomly disappear. After 10.5.3 or so the problem went away for me.

I would repair disk permissions(3 times). then, try reinstalling the 10.5.5 combo update(download this from the apple website). then repair disk permissions again once finished(3 times). See if that works. Also, in finder preferences, check in the sidebar tab that the external hard drive is selected. Also, you may want to try reformatting the drive to see if that helps. If you have another cable, i would try that as well as try plugging it into a different port on your macbook.

I would repair disk permissions(3 times). then, try reinstalling the 10.5.5 combo update(download this from the apple website). then repair disk permissions again once finished(3 times). See if that works. Also, in finder preferences, check in the sidebar tab that the external hard drive is selected. Also, you may want to try reformatting the drive to see if that helps. If you have another cable, i would try that as well as try plugging it into a different port on your macbook.

there's certainly no advantage in repairing permissions 3 times in a row, let alone 6 times (and most of the time, even once doesn't make much of a difference). it's possible that if there's a software issue and reinstalling the 10.5.5 combo updater might fix it, but there's no evidence to suggest that it is.

i made the same suggestion to check finder preferences and see if show external hard drives is checked. i suspect that's all it is (especially since he said the mac can see it in disk utility and itunes). if not, then other options can be pursued.

i made the same suggestion to check finder preferences and see if show external hard drives is checked. i suspect that's all it is (especially since he said the mac can see it in disk utility and itunes). if not, then other options can be pursued.

Nope, that's not the problem. As I pointed out in an earlier post, I CAN see my LaCie external drive, and when I plug in a WD 120, it shows up fine, the WD320 is the only one with the problem.

Also, see this thread. someone wrote a script that resolved this issue for him.

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=7031126#7031126

I have had this happen with a couple of WD external drives. Disconnecting the power and reconnecting, followed by a restart of the Mac always fixes it.