External HD no longer recognized


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I have a WD Passport that I was using as my time machine disk, but all fo a sudden it is no longer mounting. I can take it and plug it into my linux machine, mount it, navigate it, but have no permissions to add or delete on it.

Any thoughts? Is this a Time Machine issue or an OS in general? What sucks is that I can't even reformat it on another machine and start over...

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Well, kinda? It shows but, I cannot do anything to it. when I try to make a partition or anything else, it says something like "resource busy". I'm not at my mac so I can tell you exactly.

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Positive its not mounted, it isn't on the desktop nor showing in Finder. Time Machine also complains that there is no disk for it to use. I'll screenshot when I get home tonight.

Thanks so far!

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Try and verify through terminal:

To see the partitions:

diskutil list

I'd try mounting and unmounting it. If that doesn't work, do a verify to see if something's up with it.

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well looks to me like the chipset inside the external hard drive is fraked. Try booting off your leopard DVD with the hard drive pluged in and run disk util on that just to make sure it's not just some weird bug in leopard

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Try going to WDs website and downloading their latest firmware and drive management software. There have been many reports of new WD drives having issues with Leopard and Time Machine.

I even had a MyBook drive stop working. Ever since I downloaded the new firmware, I've had no problems, and most reports are showing that the firmware update has fixed other peoples problems as well.

Go to WDs website and give it a shot.

http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp

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Try going to WDs website and downloading their latest firmware and drive management software. There have been many reports of new WD drives having issues with Leopard and Time Machine.

I even had a MyBook drive stop working. Ever since I downloaded the new firmware, I've had no problems, and most reports are showing that the firmware update has fixed other peoples problems as well.

Go to WDs website and give it a shot.

http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp

Hmm, hadnt heard of that but i'll install it onto my WD drives, thanks for the heads up.

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Thanks everyone for the help. Oddly enough, some combination of me unmounting. mounting, verify, etc with the diskutil in terminal and unplugging and re-plugging the drive and my system recognized teh drive. However, it needed to be initialized and i have had to wipe it out and reformat it. Bummer.

What do you guys think? Is this a Time Machine/OSX issue or do you think it is my drive? As I said, I was able to take the drive and mount it on my linux machine (but not able to write due to permissions), so I think the drive might be fine.

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I would do what I noted, just to be sure. That way at least you've got that base covered. If it happens again, then at least you know its not because you don't have the latest firmware and drivers.

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  • 1 month later...
Thanks everyone for the help. Oddly enough, some combination of me unmounting. mounting, verify, etc with the diskutil in terminal and unplugging and re-plugging the drive and my system recognized teh drive. However, it needed to be initialized and i have had to wipe it out and reformat it. Bummer.

What do you guys think? Is this a Time Machine/OSX issue or do you think it is my drive? As I said, I was able to take the drive and mount it on my linux machine (but not able to write due to permissions), so I think the drive might be fine.

Aaron,

Typically speaking Time Machine writes resources that would be accessible under your user account so I'd suspect something happened with the drive somewhere along the way. There is always the chance there was a software issue which caused the system to write in an 'odd' way but I haven't heard of this before. :)

Prior to Time Machine use, did the drive any any 'odd' issues that you can remember?

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Nope none at all that I can think of.

(if anyone is wondering, this issue has happened again but I started talking about it in the Linux section)

Can you get me a "ls -l" report so I can see the permissions on the folders?

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