Member Avatar for Member #353682

Hi there, having strange problem with one of my USB Drives. Was working correctly this morning but midway through transferring some data, it dropped and haven't seen it since.

I'm hoping it's not as severe as a reformat or at least there might be suggestions you might have, but I'm having trouble finding help on Disk Utility on the web. I've attached some screenshots to help explain.....

The drive (called DATA) currently looks like this in Disk Utility (Picture 1), I have run a repair and it says it's been repaired. Disk Warrior looks like this (Pic 2), interestingly saying that it is mounted and it is on my desktop. Running a ls /Volumes in terminal shows the drive (pic 3) and finally, having a quick scan of my /Volumes folder in finder shows a link to the drive, but double clicking on it says that it cannot find the original item/

All a bit weird if you ask me and way beyond my knowledge of OSX. Can anyone shed some light on what's up, if my data is ok and if not, what I can do to recover it?

Thanks in advance.

T4FF

PS, running MacMini, OSX 10.4.11 and the drive is half a partition of a Seagate usb external drive.

Picture_1.pdf (9.74 KB)
Picture_2.pdf (31.46 KB)
Picture_3.pdf (5.42 KB)
Picture_4.pdf (73.68 KB)
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Building on and — who pointed at remounting and Disk Utility — the symptoms look like the kernel has mounted the partition but Finder is following a stale alias or hitting a permissions/visibility problem. Below are non‑destructive, ordered checks and safe next steps that diagnose which layer is failing (block device, filesystem, mountpoint, Finder).

Run these to identify the device, mountpoint and who’s holding it:

diskutil list
mount | grep /dev/disk
df -h
sudo lsof | grep /Volumes/DATA
ls -ld /Volumes/DATA
ls -le /Volumes/DATA

What to watch for: find the disk identifier from diskutil list (example /dev/disk2s1), confirm the mount path and filesystem type in mount, verify usable space with df, and use lsof to see processes holding files. ls -ld shows whether /Volumes/DATA is really a directory or a leftover symlink/alias and who owns it; ls -le reveals ACLs. If Finder shows an alias that fails but the device is mounted, it often means the desktop entry points to a path that no longer exists (stale mountpoint) or Finder has insufficient rights.

If the device is mounted but Finder still can’t open the root, refresh Finder first:

killall Finder

If repair is needed, unmount and run a filesystem check (only when unmounted):

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskX    # replace diskX from diskutil list
sudo fsck_hfs -fy /dev/diskXsY     # replace with the correct slice

Cautions and recovery: do not run fsck on a mounted volume. If data is important and the drive shows read errors or physical faults, create a block image before further writes (use Disk Utility or a cloning tool) and consider specialist recovery. If DiskWarrior rebuilt the directory successfully but Finder still shows a broken alias, remove the stale desktop alias and re‑mount the volume so Finder creates a fresh link.

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Member Avatar for Member #353682

anyone??

Member Avatar for ixchup

Hi there, having strange problem with one of my USB Drives. Was working correctly this morning but midway through transferring some data, it dropped and haven't seen it since.

I'm hoping it's not as severe as a reformat or at least there might be suggestions you might have, but I'm having trouble finding help on Disk Utility on the web. I've attached some screenshots to help explain.....

The drive (called DATA) currently looks like this in Disk Utility (Picture 1), I have run a repair and it says it's been repaired. Disk Warrior looks like this (Pic 2), interestingly saying that it is mounted and it is on my desktop. Running a ls /Volumes in terminal shows the drive (pic 3) and finally, having a quick scan of my /Volumes folder in finder shows a link to the drive, but double clicking on it says that it cannot find the original item/

All a bit weird if you ask me and way beyond my knowledge of OSX. Can anyone shed some light on what's up, if my data is ok and if not, what I can do to recover it?

Thanks in advance.

T4FF

PS, running MacMini, OSX 10.4.11 and the drive is half a partition of a Seagate usb external drive.

I have a sort of obvious answer that you probably have thought of, but when weird stuff happens when I am working (I use a partitioned Iomega external drive that sometimes does that), I turn off the Mac, unplug the drive. Plug it back in, then restart the Mac. The drive usually comes back online. What I find is that the data is fine. Check to see if the hard drive is formatted for a Mac or still is formatted for Windows. It seems to make a difference.

If you have already tried this trick, then I would use Tech Tools rather than Drive 10 because it is more accurate in sussing out what is going on. It could be a permissions problem or something to do with the Volume. Sometimes rebuilding the Desktop (defragging the hard drive using Tech Tool) seems to recover lost tracks that might be causing problems. But restarting seems to restore everything.

Hope this helps. I'll be interested in knowing how this turns out.

Member Avatar for atlex2

Yea, I would start by re-starting and unplugging it until you get the machine logged in. Once you're in, plug it up. If it doesn't mount, open diskutil and click the volume and hit the mount button.

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