Mount HD without using Disk Utility

[powerhouse7]

Is it possible to mount a hard drive without having to open up Disk Utility?
I often unmount my different Hard Drives then remount them later on and I'm getting sick of having to always open Disk Utility.
Is it possible, though another program/utility or in Mac OS X to mount a drive within Finder (or maybe the taskbar?)
Any help is much appreciated!

 

[Dave Braine]

I'm assuming by your iMac that they are external drives. They should show up in the Finder window sidebar, where you can eject them. If they don't show, go into Finder Preferences and tick the option. Failing that, they should be on the desktop where you can right click and eject, or just drag them to the Trash.

 

[mlts22]

If you are a command line junkie, you could do a

ls -l /Volumes

and see if they are present there.

 

[powerhouse7]

Hmm, What i'd like to see is a small utility that sits in your taskbar that allows you to mount unmounted hard drives.

I can see hard drives fine, but a lot of the time I unmount a hard drive (through the finder) but then to remount them later on I either have to pull out the cable and put it back in or do it through Disk utility.

 

[angelwatt]

You could do the given scripts via AppleScript and add them either to Automator, which can be saved as an application you can add to the dock, or you can turn on the scripts menu and add the script to its folder. Then you'll be able to access the script from anywhere as it will be accessible from your menu bar.

 

[Mal]

I'm curious, why do you unmount the drives so often? Maybe there's a workflow change that would work better than a program to mount the drives.

EDIT: Or, here's an idea that doesn't require software. Make a folder and keep it on your Dock, or somewhere else easily accessible. In it, put aliases to each of the drives you wish to be able to remount after you unmount them. Then, just double-clicking on that alias (single click if it's in the Dock, of course) will remount the drive.

jW

 

[tokyojerry]

I'm curious, why do you unmount the drives so often? Maybe there's a workflow change that would work better than a program to mount the drives.

EDIT: Or, here's an idea that doesn't require software. Make a folder and keep it on your Dock, or somewhere else easily accessible. In it, put aliases to each of the drives you wish to be able to remount after you unmount them. Then, just double-clicking on that alias (single click if it's in the Dock, of course) will remount the drive.

jW

Sorry, but, no that does not resolve the problem. I have the same exact issue... I mount certain drives before going to bed to all the system to do automatic backups throughout the night. I unmount them in the morning as I don't like to wait for the spin up of the drives each time I do an operation that requires disk access. I also don't want to have to go into disk utility every time just to remount the unmounted drives, but must do so. The suggestion to make aliases for each volume seems like an nice and easy trick... if only it worked. When you double click an alias to an unmounted drive, the system suggests if you wish to fix the alias because it can not find the drive. And the reason it can not find the drive is because the drive is unmounted. Good try though.

There is a utility called iStat Menus that has the capability of placing a pull down menu in the menubar to do exactly this. But you need to cough up I think $16 bucks for the program. Just to do that, it might not justify the expense. (Program used to be free)