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disconap

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Oct 29, 2005
1,810
3
Portland, OR
Hi all--I have a FW800 RAID0 drive that won't mount. History and attempts:

Mac Mini Server 2011 quad i7 2.0gHz, 10.8.5
Tuarus Mini LCM FW800 case
2x500gb WD Cavier Black 2.5" drives, set to RAID0 (hardware)

It worked fine until I tried to daisy-chain another FW800 drive to it (which worked fine plugged directly in). They CLAIM you can daisy chain FW800, but I've never been able to on any system. Figured I'd give it a try. It didn't work.

Since then, rebooted for another reason (iTunes wouldn't start after update). iTunes working fine now, but the FW drive won't mount. Disk Utility sees it, but when I try to mount it says "Mount failed. The disk “CashyMonkey” could not be mounted. Try running First Aid on the disk and then retry mounting."

Ran first aid, fixed a catalogue tree issue, says it's good (all subsequent first aid runs find no problem). Still getting the error when trying to mount.

In terminal, tried "mount /dev/disk2s1", received "mount: /dev/disk2s1: unknown special file or file system." Tried "diskutil mountDisk /dev/disk2s1", got "One or more volume(s) failed to mount". As descriptive and thorough as those explanations are not, I am unable to figure out how to mount. The drive isn't the most crucial in my set-up, most of the info and stored virtualbox drives and the like are backed up, but all of my download links (including DropBox) are stored on it and I'd like to not have to try anything destructive if at all avoidable.

Any thoughts? I debated hooking it up to my linux repair netbook and doing some drive scans, but would like to avoid that if at all possible...
 

Fishrrman

macrumors Penryn
Feb 20, 2009
28,241
12,388
Could be a "RAID problem", rather than a firewire problem.

Hope you have a backup of that RAID'ed volume...
 

disconap

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Oct 29, 2005
1,810
3
Portland, OR
A good thought, it's not; I was able to mount it via USB to my rescue netbook, which runs Ubuntu (which is the first time I've ever been happy I chose hardware over software RAID).

Any other thoughts? The FW bus works at least to some degree, as it does see it and my archive portable mounts via it, but still no dice with the other...
 
Last edited:

chrfr

macrumors G5
Jul 11, 2009
13,492
6,981
They CLAIM you can daisy chain FW800, but I've never been able to on any system. Figured I'd give it a try. It didn't work.

I can't imagine why this hasn't worked for you, daisy chaining Firewire 800 is fully supported and works for most users.
 

disconap

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Oct 29, 2005
1,810
3
Portland, OR
I can't imagine why this hasn't worked for you, daisy chaining Firewire 800 is fully supported and works for most users.

All I know is every time I've tried it hasn't worked. I mean, it's possible that each time I had a different problem preventing it from working, but for me it still remains to be seen (and with the server problems I had last week, I'm not opposed to that being a possibility, as Occam apparently skipped my house; who has three unconnected failures [one software, two hardware] within two hours? I mean, awesome that all the drives and data were intact, but come on, that shouldn't be a real thing). This is a prime example; plug in drives to daisy chain, one stops working, the other won't mount until it's at the head of the chain...

Anyway, since Linux can read the RAID volume in question, I was able to copy most of the data (aside from the dropbox folder, which is locked, but it's dropbox so not a problem) over to my server. Next step will be destroying the RAID, testing the drives, and rebuilding it. It just bugs me that I won't find out what caused the problem! Or why there even is one, since the data and drives are all fine and good, really...
 
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