When I woke up my MacBook today a Device Removal error dialog popped up saying my firewire drive had been removed. It had not been physically disconnected but it was running all night while the MacBook slept. So, I'm wondering if there is a keyboard shortcut or some easy way to tell the MacBook to mount any attached firewire drives.???? Anywone know how to do this? I remember in OS 9 you just had to press "command + space bar" and it would mount any SCSI drives. I don't know if that was a system feature or some third party program I had installed.
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What is the keyboard shortcut to mount firewire drive?
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I don't know any short cuts. The only way I know how to re-mount a disk (short of using Terminal) is to mount it using Disk Utility.
What happened was your Firewire drive probably went to sleep while your MB was sleeping. When the MB woke up, the Firewire drive hadn't spun back up yet, causing the Mac to think it was disconnected.
You should always unmount any external drives before you sleep your Mac. If you sleep your Mac before you unmount them, and then unplug that drive, there is a chance that the Mac was in the middle of writing a file to that drive, which would then cause data loss.
You should always unmount any external drives before you sleep your Mac. If you sleep your Mac before you unmount them, and then unplug that drive, there is a chance that the Mac was in the middle of writing a file to that drive, which would then cause data loss.
So nobody knows of a way to re-mount a firewire drive after "ejecting" it from Mac OS X? Surely there has to be a keyboard shortcut to tell the system to scan the firewire port and mount any drive attached. I use to do this in OS 9 with SCSI drives.
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Using the GUI, the easiest way would be to stick Disk Utility in your Dock, then mount the drive in there by selecting it and clicking the mount button. Maybe it's something that could be AppleScripted.
This has been noted by Apple BTW. Leopard is supposed to change things for the better.
This has been noted by Apple BTW. Leopard is supposed to change things for the better.
I forgot to mention... Disk Utility does not show any ejected firewire drives - at least for me. Am I missing something in Disk Utility? That would be fine with me - I don't mind opeing up Disk Utility - if it would work. But it doesn't show the drive. Is there a way to tell Disk Utility to "rescan" the firewire port or something like that? I just tried it last night... I ejected my 250GB firewire drive then opened up Disk Utility and all I saw in there was my internal Macintosh HD. What am I doing wrong? Or could it be that my firewire drive enclosure is a piece of junk???
I have two external drives, and when I plug them into either my PowerBook or iMac they show in Disk Utility even when dismounted. However, I am using PowerPC machines with Open Firmware. If you're on an Intel Mac with EFI, the behaviour may be different.
Anyone able to confirm?
I haven't got any Firewire drives available, but if I eject/unmount a USB drive from my MacBook without physically disconnecting it, it shows up in Disk Utility and lets me remount it...
Weird it is not what i am getting with USB/firewire drives on my iMac
If you eject the disk then it doesn't appear in Disk Utility or even Terminal.
If you unmount the disk it does appear in both Terminal and Disk Utility.
What is the difference between ejecting and unmounting??? I know how to eject. How do you unmount a drive?
Ejecting means the drive is ready to be disconnected from the computer. Unmounting is slightly different, you are able to remount the drive but in its unmounted state it will not be able to be read from /written to.
To unmount a drive either do it in disk utility or in Terminal:
Get the drive name from "diskutil list" the name will be something like disk1s1 then,
"diskutil unmount disk1s1" obviously changing the disk name
The unmounting process will only proceed once the data has finished being transferred, however you still need to eject the disk before physical removal from the system. IF you do not eject the disk, in my expereince, you get the "device removal" box. So in that regards it is not as safe as you may forget to eject the disk.
I unmount drives via an application i wrote in applescript to interface with terminal. I always eject the disks before removal.
Seems to me like firewire/usb/computer now days should be smart enough to not require the user to "eject" a drive/device before unplugging it. The system/drives should have smarts and things in place to prevent data from being corrupted.