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mainstreetmark

macrumors 68020
Original poster
May 7, 2003
2,228
293
Saint Augustine, FL
My new external drive won't mount. :(

I bought an external drive off ebay. 300 gigs of sweetness. I backed up my powerbook's harddrive, re-installed the OS for the first time since jaguar, and copied back some of my data (music, and pretty much nothing else).

meanwhile, I plugged it in to my 10 month old PC, who's only job until now was to hold my movies. The PC had a bit of a time copying the movies to the drive, but I blamed that on being a PC.

Ok, so, after that, I copy my Documents folder over, only to get hit with tons of I/O errors (as shown in system.log). I try a day later, 2 days later, etc.. won't work. It'll take about 4 hours attempting to copy, before it just gives up and copies nothing.

During these attempts, the whole system is useless. I can't do anything, because some low-level I/O is waiting for a timeout, so I just turn off the drive. OSX returns to normal, etc, etc and I carry out that task.

But, now, when I plug the drive back in - it won't mount. In fact, Disk Utility will sit there with a spinning cursor indefinitely, up until the point where I turn off the drive. Then, it shows my drives, and surprisingly, a ghost of a drive in question, as any operations on that drive fail (the drive is, in fact, off)

How do you get OSX to recognize this crappy drive so I can at least reformat it or something.

(and, PS, after copying the movies off and shutting down the PC, it won't boot either. It's harddrive makes a scary noise as soon as it's accessed, and it reboots, over and over and over... it sucks)
 
If the actual hard drive is making bad noises, then it doesn't sound like it has anything to do with your Apple or OSX.

Have you communicated back to the seller?
 
The harddrive in my crappy PC is making the noise. I do not care to fix that one at the moment.

However, the external makes no unusual noises whatsoever. It simply won't show up - ever. Disk Utility spins and spins until the exact instant I unplugged my harddrive.
 
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