External HD Not Mounting

[Ridemonkey]

I installed the latest Quicktime update this morning, and restarted. When everything booted up again my external HD didn't mount. I tried restarting the drive, and I heard the drive start up, no weird sounds, just the usual quiet whirring, but still nothing. No error, no drive. Rebooting the computer again didn't help either.

In disk utility, the drive is listed, but isn't mountable.

Any ideas?

http://www.thodyconsulting.com/drop/disk.png

[DirtyDog]

Some spanish fly perhaps?

[Pau11y]

Um... get a PC :D

Can you just picture that Mac/PC commercial... The Mac guy holding the PC guy's hand and trying to unzip his fly w/ his other free hand so he could "mount" something!

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

[SkaredShtles]

Is this a USB drive? Firewire? SCSI?

[Ridemonkey]

LaCie Firewire

[Toshi]

your screenshot shows the drive (mechanism) but no volumes (the thing below the mechanism). sooooo i think your drive may have bit the bullet.

[Ridemonkey]

Weird ****. I ended up reformatting the drive and it's fine now, so there's nothing physically wrong with it. It must not have unmounted properly or something during the reboot and it corrupted the directory structure. PAIN IN THE ASS>

[Toshi]

so you just restored from your daily backup, right? :D

[Ridemonkey]

Riiiight. Unfortunately, I don't backup all 200GB onto 50 DVDs, so I lost a lot of crap. My old set up mirrored my laptop HD on the external so I had two copies...when my laptop HD died I bought an iMac, and haven't set up the mirroring yet...so my backup is now dead. Luckily, I backed up my backup of most of the really important stuff. I only really lost some super old stuff, and some other stuff that I can recover, but it will be a painstaking process.

[spincrazy]

deja effin vu http://www.ridemonkey.com/forums/showthread.php?t=162349

[BigMike]

Riiiight. Unfortunately, I don't backup all 200GB onto 50 DVDs, so I lost a lot of crap. My old set up mirrored my laptop HD on the external so I had two copies...when my laptop HD died I bought an iMac, and haven't set up the mirroring yet...so my backup is now dead. Luckily, I backed up my backup of most of the really important stuff. I only really lost some super old stuff, and some other stuff that I can recover, but it will be a painstaking process.


I think my brain just exploded

[oiswego]

if it happens again---instead of depending on your os to mount it automatically.....
try and mount it from the terminal with a command similar to this:
mount /dev/sda /mnt/media -t vfat

where /dev/sda is your usb port from the hdd, /mnt/media is the directory you want to mount to and vfat is the partition type (in this case, vfat translates to fat32).
for more possible combinations, simply do a "man mount" from the command line (yes, i know that sounds really gay but it will actually display something!)