External FW drive not mounting

israces

I have a WD 120GB Caviar drive in an ADS Pyro case. It has started behaving badly. First it would spin up and down for no reason in the middle of operation. Then it would spin down and cause Finder hangs. Now it will not mount and some computers can see it and some cannot.



When I run system profiler on my PB, it sees the Oxford Chipset, but does not see the drive itself. When I hook it to a friend's ibook, it sees the drive but will not mount it.



Disk Warrior hangs and so does Tech Tool when I try to have them look for the drive.



I get the following report from console log:



Sep 6 13:17:10 Czar /sbin/autodiskmount[195]: Some fsck failed!



Sep 6 13:17:10 Czar /sbin/autodiskmount[195]: disk2s9 hfs yes yes Caviar 120GB [not mounted]



Sep 6 13:17:10 Czar /sbin/autodiskmount[195]: (autodiskmount.tproj/DiskArbitrationServerMain.c:1665) failed to set up death notifications for port -1: {0x4} (os/kern) invalid argument



Sep 6 13:17:10 Czar /sbin/autodiskmount[195]: (autodiskmount.tproj/DiskArbitrationServerMain.c:410) received unrecognized message (id=0x47) on notify port



Anyone know what is happening here? Any ideas? Anything would be appreciated as I have 80GB of data on there that I really want back.

mattarino

I recently went through a similar problem with an external hd that wouldn't mount. Actually, the drive I had was partitioned into 3 parts, and it would only mount the 2 smaller ones (of course, the ones that didn't have the important info).



Anyway, the only program I found that could analyze the drive and retrieve the info was DataRescueX. Here is the link for the app on Macupdate: http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/10259. You can download and use it, but it will only allow you to retrieve 1 item at a time. The full version is $90, and worth it, depending on how bad you want your data back. It will cost a lot more to have it done professionally. This program will not fix the drive, though. You will have to use something else, or just reformat it once you get your stuff back.



A couple things, though:

1. Of course, you will need as much empty space on your internal drive or another external for you to retrieve the data to. Keep that in mind.



2. It takes a LONG time for the program to analyze your drive. Again, it's worth the wait if it's the only way to get the important data back. Once the drive is analyzed, make sure to save that info file so you can open it back up in case you want to retrieve more files (and not have to go through the excruciatingly long analyze time).



3. The PDF manual is fairly important to go through before you start. Still, it doesn't answer all questions. I'll be happy to respond with a post to help if you have problems (as long as I happened to experience them, as well).



Good luck. I am anxious to see if anyone else has had luck/bad luck with this program or any other ones. Good knowledge to have.

Thanks.

israces

I tried Data Rescue X just now. It sees the drive, but hangs as soon as it tries to do the recovery. Once it hangs, it will not respond to anything, not even force quit. Once the drive is physically turned off, it will respond to the force quit command, but do nothing else.



Also, I have managed to trick DiskWarrior into seeing the drive, but it crashes immediately when I ask it to perform a repair on the directory.



As soon as the drive is powered off, the OS shows the standard "OS cannot read volume, do you want to Initialize?" and "Do you want to launch Disk First Aid?" pop-ups.



Additionally, top shows that fsck_hfs hangs when the drive is first plugged in. How is that happening?



I think something is seriously wrong with the way my os mounts external FW drives, but it still mounts my ipod without a hitch.



This one is recoverable, I know it, I'm just missing something easy.

mattarino

What happens when the Data Rescue hangs on you? Like I said, it will take a long time. In my case, it took over a day to run the scan, then additional hours to retrieve. When it hangs, are you in the scanning or recovery stage?

kraig911

while back I had the same problem, something came up called disk key corrupted, when I finally let a program go through its paces, I incidentally though it had crashed as well, but just waited. I had to reformat tho

israces

It hangs in the scan stage and absolutely no progress is shown on the progress bar and I cannot see any disk activity on the drive.



I didn't know it could take days though!!!!



I will set it up to run overnight tonight and see what happens.



Edit: Ok, I decided to give DW one more shot with some more tricks a friend suggested. I have no idea what worked, because I tried several things back to back (reset pram, nvram, cycling the drive duirng OS boot, etc.) but DW finally started working rebuilding the directory--then it hung again. Feeling the courage that comes with desperation, I quickly cycled the power on the drive. Then DW began working again--then hung again. A few more times of this cycling power and hanging and DW finally finished. It indicated that it repaired a few things but that it could not create the newly repaired directory due to a "Mac OS Services Failure."



So then I ran Data Rescue just to see if it would work and it did!! I have been able to pull some of the most important stuff off and I am going to dump the rest on a friend's external drive tomorrow while I see if I can repair my current drive. Data Rescue reports one bad sector is causing the problems.



I still think the OS is hosed somehow too, so there will be a new install of that once all my data is backed up somewhere else. (This was my backup disk that crashed).



If anyone has any clues about the error messages from the OS above, I'd be interested in knowing how to prevent those in the future.



Lessoned to be learned here: Backup your backup.