Mac Forum / General / Hardware / November 2006

Hi, I've had this on comp.sys.mac.hardware.storage for four days.  I
haven't had any replies, so I'm cross-posting to see if anyone can
help.

Hi,

At some point in the past my 80G Maxtor external hard drive stopped
mounting. This was on 10.3.9 and I looked around the net a lot for a
solution but couldn't get anything to work.  The external drive would
show in both Disk Utility and System Profiler, but not mount.  A few
days ago I finally put 10.4.6 on my iBook and thought to dust off the
external HD and give it a go.  Miracle of miracles, when plugged in it
mounted!  Fantastic, but then it stopped mounting again.  I think it
was because it was 'disconnected improperly' when my iBook went to
sleep on shutting the lid.

Now I'm back to where I started (if I get it to mount again I'll be
sure to always unmount properly in the future).  Again it can be seen
in DU and SysProfiler, but no mount.  I can eject from DU, but the
'mount' option is grayed out.  When I last had the problem I took the
HD to a friends house and checked to see if I could still access files,
but this was on a PC (exernal HD originally FAT32 formatted).    It was
fine
on PC, and seemed to have been when it was initially remounting on
first installing 10.4.6.  I tried reinstalling 10.4.6 this morning to
see if I could get it to mount again on the 'new' system, but no luck.

I'm tempted to try back-installing to 10.3.9 to see if it mounts, then
forward again to 10.4.6, but as you may have already guessed, I don't
really know what I'm doing, so please tell me if that's a really,
really bad idea.  Other than that, I got this error message below when
running 'verify disk'  in DU.

Many thanks for any help, and if there's a better group to be posting
this under, please also let me know.

-----------------
Verifying volume "MAXTOR80G"
** /dev/disk3s5
** Phase 1 - Read FAT
** Phase 2 - Check Cluster Chains
** Phase 3 - Checking Directories
Unable to read directory (Input/output error)
Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit

1 non HFS volume checked
       Volume needs repair

----------------