Internal drive won't mount

Fahrvergnuugen

Fahrvergnuugen

I am the law!
I've got a dual 2GHz G5 with two 250GB SATA internal drives. One day after a reboot the secondary drive didn't show up on the desktop. I ran a surface scan with tech tool pro and its reporting that there are 2 bad sectors on the drive.

Apple's Disk utility on the other hand, says that the drive is fine

Code: 
Verifying volume “Space”
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
Checking volume bitmap.
Checking volume information.
The volume Space appears to be OK.

1 volume checked
	[COLOR=SeaGreen]HFS volume verified[/COLOR]

If I click the "mount" button in disk utility, it hangs for a few seconds and then nothing happens. The disk won't mount.
Any ideas?
 
Well, something may be wrong with the drive. Could TechTool Pro fix the two bad sectors? Try to do that. If it can, then great. If not, Boot from an OS X disk and try to discover it and reformat it.
 
Does the drive show up in the Profiler? If so, what does the S.M.A.R.T. line say? Verified?
Just for fun: did you repair permissions?
 
S.M.A.R.T. checks are fine. The repair permissions button is grayed out... I'm assuming because its not mounted. I don't see a way in TTP to fix bad blocks, I only see the surface scan utility.

I really need to figure out some way to rescue my data, TTP doesn't seem to have anything that can do it if the drive isn't mounted. :(
 
Try something with your girlfriends lap and her top tonight? I really hope it will get you somewhere so you can "mount your disk". :D ;)
Sorry, I am kinda weird today..
 
alright, so... none of the above has worked.

does anybody know how to use the mount command in OSX? I know you can do it verbosly, maybe it will give me some clue as to why it won't mount.
 
You may want to contact Apple about this. In the first generation of G5s, people reported their hard drives getting hot -- too hot. Too hot to even touch. That's too hot, and can cause errors.

Also, what brand of drive is it? This may be biased, but if it's anything other than Western Digital, I would be suspect of it. Especially Maxtor.

Are you still under warranty? Do you have AppleCare? Even if "no" to both of those, it wouldn't hurt to call Apple and tell them what's happening. It may be a known condition.
 
That generation G5 is a good point. See this article about first generation G5s cooling problem. Apple quietly fixed the sensor problem in V2s.
 
You might also try to hook up the harddrives the other way round and then boot from the OS X installer CD. If the installer allows you to install Mac OS X on that icky harddrive, do so choosing a minimum in custom installation. Then try to let the machine boot OS X from that drive. If all works well, you'll be able to back things up before switching the cables again.

After that you can try and reformat the drive, check it etc. or bring it back to the store for replacement (warranty?).
 
Thanks for the feedback and links...
I've known about the G5 cooling problem since December (when my first hard drive failed). I have dual 250 GB maxtor drives - I'm not a huge fan of maxtor, but thats what came in the machine. A few months ago, Tech Tool Pro sent me an email saying that the smart checks were failing on the new drive that apple gave me after fixing the first one (some number was out of range). On top of that the machine will randomly shut itself off for no reason -even while you are using it. Its not going to sleep, its shutting off - but thats a WHOLE 'nother story..

So I brought it to my local Apple store. They had it for over a week and couldn't find anything wrong with it. The tech told me he ran hardware tests on it the whole time and nothing out of the ordinary was found. figures. I asked him about the smart checks and he said that TTP must be wrong. *sigh*

Now, none of the software checks I've run can find anything at all wrong with the drives. I've run Tech Tool Pro, Disk Warrior, Disk Utility and fsck_hfs from single user mode, all of which reported no problems. (during a surface scan, Tech Tool Pro reported that it found 2 bad blocks on the drive in question, but a subsequent run didn't find any errors).

After booting into single user mode and running fsck_hfs -yf on both of my drives, I rebooted and the machine hung on the apple startup screen with the rotating icon. It sat there for 30 minutes with the fans on full blast until I killed it. I tried it again...still wouldn't boot. Single user mode worked fine mind you.

At this point I was beyond frustrated... my secondary drive with all of my data wouldn't mount and now the machine wouldn't even boot to the primary drive. I booted to the 10.3 installation disk and it still wouldn't mount the secondary drive.

For some reason I tried the software restore dvd that came with my machine (10.2). I booted to that and low and behold, my secondary drive showed up as a valid installation directory.

I installed 10.2 to the secondary drive, upgraded it to 10.3 and now the machine is running on a fresh copy of panther. :confused:

So I have two 250 GB drives, over 400GB of data, 3 installations of OSX on 2 different drives and the eerie feeling that something catastrophic is about to happen and I'm going to lose all of my precious data.

I need to figure out a cost effective way to save all of my data... Maybe I should buy an external FW 800 raid array... and then run the two 250 GB drives in Mirror RAID for my system. Seems like a waste of space, but I'm sick of this.
 
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