Help me mac users, you're my only hope...

[Hawk Teflon]

I couldn't find an apple thread, so I'm posting here. Hopefully someone can explain this to me:

I am at work on a Macbook Pro. I have TWO external drives daisy chained via FW 800. One is a 1TB WD drive, and one is a 500GB Seagate. The WD is connected to the MBP, and the SG is connected to the WD:

Comp<--WD<--SG

The WD isn't mounting to my computer, but the SG is. How does that work?! I've tried rebooting, but only the SG will mount. How can I force the WD to mount, and why does a drive connected to a non-mounting drive mount?

Yes, I tries googling, but all of the results are for new drives. I've been using each of these drives about a year now.

Also, the WD mount is lighting up and spinning like normal.

[chriscurl]

So even if it is the only drive, the WD wont mount, but it has been working fine in the past?

[Hawk Teflon]

Yep. If I remove the Seagate, there are no external drives mounted.

Yeah, this is my primary drive that all of my projects are on.

[chriscurl]

I know with my Lacie's I have at home and that we use at work, 99.9% of the time it is a bad power supply. I don't know much about the exact way that WD drives blow.

[J Davis]

This happens to me occaisionally when I have 2 drives daisy chained. Only solution I've found is to restart and check all connections to make sure
cables are secure. Sometimes I have had to trick the computer by reversing the order of the drives or go to a diff firewire port.

[Hawk Teflon]

I can't change the ports. I have only one FW 800 on the computer, and the SG only has one out, no in's.

[Batutta]

Open Disk Utility and see if the drive comes up there. If it's visible but greyed out, select mount. If that works, i'd run disk repair for good measure. If you can't see it there at all, your problem is more serious. It could be formatted NTFS-3G, in which case you'll need this extension to see it -- http://mac.softpedia.com/get/System-.../NTFS-3G.shtml. If this doesn't help, you may have to resort to more serious disk first aid programs, but they aren't free. You might want to see if you can get it to mount on someone else's computer as well, in which case you can copy the material to another drive.

[J Davis]

I can't change the ports. I have only one FW 800 on the computer, and the SG only has one out, no in's.

I didn't mean for a working setup. Just to get it's kinks sorted.
Try plugging the SG into the computer and restart. then dismount plug the WD into the computer and restart.
Once they are both mounting go back to your orig daisy chain setup

[Hawk Teflon]

I didn't mean for a working setup. Just to get it's kinks sorted.
Try plugging the SG into the computer and restart. then dismount plug the WD into the computer and restart.
Once they are both mounting go back to your orig daisy chain setup

Thanks everyone. This seemed to do the trick. I restarted with just the SG, which made the same outcome, then I shut it down. I unplugged everything and kept it all off for about 10 minutes. I plugged it all back in piece by piece and the WD mounted before I even attempted the SG. Thanks again, guys!

Any idea what would cause it to do this?

Oh, and it wasn't located in the Disk Utility menu earlier. I checked that. I wasn't excited about that.

[Mike McNeese]

Not sure that I can say for certain what the issue is. I have three old WD 250GB FW drives that always gave me a big headache...sometimes they'd mount. Sometimes they wouldn't. I switched to two chained 2TB Lacie drives, and I've not had an issue. Perhaps it's just WD drives?

In fact, sometimes the drives would stop spinning, and they would eject themselves - without a warning window from the OS telling me that they were ejected improperly!