I have an external drive set up to do my backups daily. When using my USB hub, everything worked great. Recently I decided to "de-clutter" and when I removed the USB hub and plug the drive in directly it won't read it or do my backups. The drive lights up, you hear it spinning, but it never shows up in Lion as a drive and time machine tells me that I don't have a drive connected. Any ideas from someone smarter than me (which is probably all of you)?
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Time Machine Issue
- Thread starter btrav13
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that happened to me, i tried to use time machine to restore back from lion to snow leopard and then that occurred. what I did was restarted my computer (with the USB disconnected) then once it was back on and normal, reconnected it, left it alone for a while (it lighted up and disk was spinning) eventually when I came back it was working. I'm not sure what happens, but i think the OS is working out something with the drive, and blah blah. It worked for me, hopefully this works for you too. The OS just needs to finish its job.
I'll try this and see. It had been doing it on Snow Leopard and is now still doing it on Lion, so it's been a while. I'll leave it plugged up and see if it ever shows.
Sometimes I plug in a disk and it doesn't mount. I launch disk utility to see if it sees the drive as unformatted space. If it doesn't even show up in Disk Utility I simply unplug it and plug it in again. I've never run across a situation where a drive doesn't show up after a few minutes. Why not put the hub back in and see if the drive starts to show up? Was it a powered hub? Perhaps it is providing more power to the drive. Is the drive usb powered? Perhaps the usb port on your Mac is "weak". You can try the other usb port or you can try a powered hub.
It has still never shown up. Going to run down the answers to your questions here, see what you think:
It does not show up under disc utility at all, it's like it's a ghost drive. The hub was a powered hub, and it will show up if I go back to using the hub. The drive plugs into a power outlet, not just USB powered. I've plugged it into both USB ports and get the same result. I can plug the hub into both ports and it shows up both times.
I was just a little disappointed because the hub took up space, had two more cords to it, and I still needed the drive and it's two cords (wall outlet and usb). So I just had this huge tangled mess of 4 cords for 1 drive, so I thought "why not just kill the middle-man and get rid of this hub that only has one thing plugged into it". I can always go back to it, I just felt like it should work without that hub, ya know?