Nice. Lion main boot drive in iMac won't mount anymore. Nice.

[aliensporebomb]

So I installed Lion less then 10 days ago.

Now my main boot drive won't boot anymore - I'm running on a Firewire 800 backup presently.

Disk utility claims it can't repair the disk and I should mount it and back up my data prior to reformatting to rebuild the OS.

Problem: disk utility also won't mount the drive.

My backup is less than a week old but I just saved some items to that boot drive this morning that I can't get to.

Anyone know of any software that will perform an emergency mount of a drive?

Not shaping up to be a great weekend for me - fighting a head cold and now this. Oof.

 

[brand]

From what limited info we have, it sounds like the internal hard drive is faulty due to hardware failure. Depending on the type of failure you might not find any software that will be able to mount the partition and recover the files. If it is still covered under AppleCare you need to call Apple as soon as possible.

 

[Nuckinfuts]

If you're Terminal literate and can use commands, you can dump the contents of an entire drive block by block to an iso file using the "dd" command.

 

[aliensporebomb]

Um...

Oh great - I am aware of the recent drive recall.

I did check the serial number of the drive and the AppleCare site did say it was not part of the drives affected - I suppose being mechanical it is susceptible to failure like anything else.

I'm actually trying to reformat the drive presently just in case I can reinstall the OS though. Looks like that will fail most likely.

Yes, I have AppleCare for another year so that's good anyway.

 

[aliensporebomb]

Oh:

I did get the drive to resurrect long enough to get the files I needed off the drive but this kind of thing really shouldn't happen.

When I see drives fail it generally occurs when the machine is either brand new or very old, not a year into ownership.

I'll keep everyone posted with what I find.

 

[agentphish]

I did get the drive to resurrect long enough to get the files I needed off the drive but this kind of thing really shouldn't happen.

When I see drives fail it generally occurs when the machine is either brand new or very old, not a year into ownership.

I'll keep everyone posted with what I find.

You are so completely wrong in your thoughts on drive failure. If you have ever spent serious amounts of time working with computers you would know that every hard drive ever made can and will fail at any given time. They are mechanical, therefore they can fail at any time. It's a very simple premise really.

This kind of thing happens every single day to many people.

This is why you make a backup.

 

[aliensporebomb]

Sigh

I have backups at this point. I know, mechanical storage drives can and will fail at any time for any reason. They're made out of tiny moving parts and are really a primitive way to store large amounts of data but it's what I have.

Latest:

Shut the works down for a few hours, rebooted off of the "Lion Boot DVD" and reformatted that drive - appears to work fine at this point. Now am backing data up on my "backup boot drive" so I can get it below a terabyte in size so I can use superduper to replicate it so I can boot off the original hard drive again.

Thoughts:

It might very well be a failing drive but we shall see. I need to see what Apple says about the whole shooting match.

And speaking of "spending time with computers" - it's been my living for almost two decades so yes, I know how they behave.

 

[ssn637]

I have backups at this point. I know, mechanical storage drives can and will fail at any time for any reason. They're made out of tiny moving parts and are really a primitive way to store large amounts of data but it's what I have.

Latest:

Shut the works down for a few hours, rebooted off of the "Lion Boot DVD" and reformatted that drive - appears to work fine at this point. Now am backing data up on my "backup boot drive" so I can get it below a terabyte in size so I can use superduper to replicate it so I can boot off the original hard drive again.

Thoughts:

It might very well be a failing drive but we shall see. I need to see what Apple says about the whole shooting match.

And speaking of "spending time with computers" - it's been my living for almost two decades so yes, I know how they behave.

Your hard drive may not be at fault. I had the exact same problem yesterday following a clean installation of 10.7 on a MacBook Pro 13" 2009 model which had been running for a couple of weeks. The computer failed to start and in recovery mode was unable to repair the partition. I reinstalled from a USB drive after wiping the partition and will keep an eye on it. The Windows 7 Boot Camp partition on the same drive is working just fine...

 

[aliensporebomb]

Sigh

I'm concerned that we have a newish operating system that just decides to scuttle the drive after a couple of weeks.

What's to stop it in the future?

Rebuilding my OS every couple of weeks would be a giant pain in the you-know-where.

 

[Nuckinfuts]

I'm concerned that we have a newish operating system that just decides to scuttle the drive after a couple of weeks.

What's to stop it in the future?

Rebuilding my OS every couple of weeks would be a giant pain in the you-know-where.

It's more HFS+ than Lion at fault, HFS+ needs to die in a fiery death.

 

[aliensporebomb]

Latest

After I brought it to the Apple Store sparing you the long story there they got it to 10.68.

Brought it home and booted it and it offers to copy data from another drive so I told it to use the data from my 10.7 Lion Firewire 800 boot drive. This was, in retrospect, a pretty big error.

It took several hours to copy all of the data.

After that was done it apparently intermingled part of 10.6 and 10.7 since most of iLife fails on boot except for Garageband, iTunes is also borked - you launch and get a white screen filled with hexadecimal codes and some of the icons for Lion (and the desktop background) got migrated over. "About this Macintosh" confirms I am on 10.68.

Tried installing Lion and got a dialog "ALERT: This computer cannot run OS 10.7". OK, nice try I guess. So much for "this just works".

I might have to wipe the internal and start all over again with SuperDuper or the like since it's obvious Snow Leopard's migration utility broke something pretty nicely.

Then at least I'll have a 1:1 copy from the external drive to the internal.

 

[aliensporebomb]

Gack

Finally up and running. What a pain that was.