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michaeldc

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 2, 2014
5
0
Hi all, I have a bit of an odd problem with an ext hdd, if anyone has any ideas and the time to help then I would greatly appreciate it.

My iMac has a 1tb internal HDD partitioned 3 times in the following order - Macintosh HD / BOOTCAMP / Files (NTFS format)

I bought a brand new Toshiba 1tb external HDD so I could 'clone' the internal drive in case of drive failure. The structure for the external HDD is Mac-BackUp (with a bootable superduper clone), Win8-BackUp (with a winclone image of BOOTCAMP) and Files-BackUp (NTFS format).

1. When in Bootcamp my Files drive does not show up, I believe this is something to do with the bootloader and the Files partition effectively being the 5th partition (taking recovery and another I don't recall into consideration) and Windows won't read the 5th Partition - is that correct? Any way around it?

2. If I eject my external drive it won't show again in OSX unless I restart my computer which surprises me as other external HDDs always remounted without issue - is this down to having a bootable clone parition on the drive?

3. The bootable clone on the external HDD does not show up in my boot list when I restart and hold Alt - It really should, shouldn't it? The Toshiba has a power saving function which means it stops spinning (though doesn't eject) when not in use - is this the issue with it not showing in the Alt boot screen perhaps? Making it redundant for a superduper backup as I won't be able to boot off it?

4. The NTFS Files-BackUp on the external HDD does not mount in Bootcamp - again, is this due to it being partitioned and having HFS partitioned on it? I assumed it would mount all 3 partitions without any problem.

Lots of questions I know but I can't find any relevant answers on the web so again, any advise would be very much appreciated.

Thanks for reading!
Michael
 
Unsure, I used disk utility so I believe GUID.

Incidentally, point 2 may be resolved since yesterday for some reason. Today, I ejected it and plugged it back in and hey presto, all partitions mounted again. Not sure why it didn't work yesterday but again, a restart most likely blew a few cobwebs away... somehow.

Thank you for replying, over 500 views and no response made me think this was a rather unique set of problems. It still may be...
 
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