June 3rd, 2007
Solving mounting problem on MacOS X
This is a highly specific post, but I thought I’d write about this so that if someone else have the same problem, they can try to solve it my way.
I got a new computer, Intel-based MBP last week. I upgraded it to latest OSX version (10.4.9 I believe), and immediately installed everything I needed. While ending my last job and returning the laptop associated with that post, I made backups to a 500GB USB LACIE hard drive. Very nice indeed, and half my life is now on that hard drive. (I have most of it on other places too, but not so easily accessible).
The first thing I managed to do was to shut off the hard drive without unmounting it correctly from OSX. I got the warning et all, but well, done is done. It was stupid, I know. Starting out with messing up everything. So what happened? Well, the next time I tried to get OSX to find my hard drive, by inputing the USB connection and switching on the power. Nothing happened. The drive would spin up, but no mount points or nice icons on the desktop. After some investigation I found that the Disk Manager HANGS when the LACIE is turned on and connected. I also found that when I switched the power off, my console says something about not being able to repair disk /dev/disk2s1. Interesting. After a few hours investigation on the Internet I despaired, and decided to try my own ingenuity instead.
I won’t tell you about everything I did to find this solution. It would get severely boring very fast. So, here is the solution:
1. Attach the device and turn on the power.
2. Open up a terminal and create a new directory in /Volumes, (eg sudo mkdir /Volumes/LACIE2).
3. Mount the drive explicitly on this mount point (sudo mount -t msdos /dev/disk2s1 /Volumes/LACIE2).
4. Delete ALL .DS_Store files on the disk (cd /Volumes/LACIE2; find . -name ‘DS_Store’ -exec rm -rf \{\} \;).
5. Wait for a while. At this point you should have two LACIE drives on your Desktop, one fake and one real. Unmount the real one by dragging it to the trash can.
6. Turn of the external hard drive, or detach it.
7. Reboot.
8. Attach/Turn on the external hard drive.
This is a process that works for me, and my drive is now back to working mode. It seems that OSX stores some information in the DS_Store files somewhere on the disk that got corrupted for me. Hopefully this information can help someone else with the same problem.
