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New External Hard Drive won't mount - ugh!

peevies

peevies

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 15, 2006
38
1
MA
Hi, I gleefully convinced my cousin to switch to mac, being a fairly new switcher myself. No complaints about that. I bought myself a nifty OWC elite external hard drive which was an awesome plug and play/works great. My cousin bought a brand new 24' imac 2.4 Ghz intel core 2 duo and decided to go for the giant 1TB Western Digital My Book Pro II. We did the set up the guy at the Apple store recommended- HFC+ and RAID 1 (something to that effect) under disc utility - I just forget now. It has worked great up until he had a brief power outage the other night. Now the My Book doesn't mount and neither of us noobs have been able to figure or google it out! We tried unplugging/rebooting/reinstalling the WD install disc-but getting nowhere. We always used the firewire 800. Today I tried connecting with the USB and got some kind of volume info showing with disc utility, but didn't want to continue since we don't know what we are doing. I see from some Apple discussion forums that the Firewire 800 may not work so well with some external HDD for whatever reason. Just wondering if there is a thread I missed, or some solution out there to get this thing working again. I wouldn't be hurt if someone replies..."just go to WD support", but I sorta expect a run around. We have no clue how to proceed. He only had a few weeks of media stuff stored on it, but Man, it was a pricey drive to buy!:( Any suggestions at all would be very appreciated. Thanks!
 
If this is an HFS+ disk (I think that's what you were trying to say) and it comes up when you use USB, then plug it in via USB, open Disk Utility, and try "repair disk" on it.

Do you have any other hardware through which you can figure out if the FW800 interface on the drive and/or the Mac got blown up in the electrical surge?
 
HFS+ was right-oops! We were wishing we had something between us that had a firewire 800 port, but that is a very good suggestion. Neither of us are comfortable messing around in disc utility, but we'll certainly try the disk repair suggestion. He isn't sure what happened, but he said he was on the imac with the My Book drive on, lost power, and then got the "device was improperly shut down/removed" message. He couldn't see the icon mount on the desktop afterwards and has gone through a series of re-installation attempts that just don't work. Only the first set up we did together made any sense. Maybe the 800 port or cable is affected or something is corrupted. GAHHH!- Thanks so far. It is puzzling. I wonder if we may have to get appzapper or something to get the devil-possessed WD crap out or we can test the 800 port with something. I wish I convinced him to get the OWC drive like I got.......I love that thing!
 
I don't think there's any Western Digital software to be erased. If you got the improperly ejected warning, and then had trouble with the disk, then usually this is a problem repair disk can fix, and hopefully that's all that's wrong with it. :)
 
Well, that is sounding good........I will be learning all I can about disc utility and disc repairs so that I understand it better. I wanted to try stuff in there, but feel like it is unknown territory on the mac. Maybe I was doing something wrong, but I swear it was verifying the disc fine, repairing permissions fine, but would not give me the option to hit repair disc when I wanted to try that. I'm just paranoid that I will mess up his mac with disc utility. (..."hmmmmmmm.....I wonder what THIS button does.....") Thanks!
 
Repair disk should be available for any drive except the boot drive... It does something completely different from repairing permissions. What it does is looks for any errors in the logical structure of the drive. This happens when for instance, the drive gets shut off in the middle of writing a state change, and the change is only partially recorded. Journaling drives usually can recover from this without any need for intervention, but occasionally they do get messed up as a result, and then it fixes them.
 
We also did a few things when the drive was off and disconnected, so maybe it was as simple as having it all hooked up, installed software, and switched on before we went into disc utility. (DUH) We fought with it for two hours, then I gave up and went home. Disc utility did seem to recognize it, but we couldn't get the drive to respond, or show up to be accessed anywhere. :mad:
 
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