External Hard Drive

Very off-Freeway this one.

I have a LaCie Ethernet Mini NAS with both ethernet and USB in/outputs. I have retrieved a load of files to it from another disk which died, using File Salvage, which seems to have done it’s job nicely.

On the LaCie there is a folder of 70,000 files and to access it via the ethernet connection takes forever, so I thought I’d try it via the USB 2 connection to see if it was any faster.

I restarted having substituted the relevant cables and it can be seen in the system profiler along with my other externals, but it doesn’t mount on the desktop.

Does anyone know of a way to force it to mount?

Thanks Trev

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On 6 Aug 2008, at 18:43, Trevreav wrote:

I restarted having substituted the relevant cables and it can be seen in the system profiler along with my other externals, but it doesn’t mount on the desktop.

Does anyone know of a way to force it to mount?

Maybe try ‘repair disk’ using Disk Utility?

best wishes,

Paul Bradforth

http://www.paulbradforth.com

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Thanks for the reply paul, but Disk Utility can’t see it, only System Profiler.

Trev

On 6 Aug 2008, at 19:56, Paul Bradforth wrote:

On 6 Aug 2008, at 18:43, Trevreav wrote:

I restarted having substituted the relevant cables and it can be seen in the system profiler along with my other externals, but it doesn’t mount on the desktop.

Does anyone know of a way to force it to mount?

Maybe try ‘repair disk’ using Disk Utility?

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On 6 Aug 2008, at 22:14, Trevor Reaveley wrote:

Thanks for the reply paul, but Disk Utility can’t see it, only System Profiler.

Oh well, my idea won’t work; sorry.

best wishes,

Paul Bradforth

http://www.paulbradforth.com

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I’ve had similar problems and the only solution that worked for me was to rebuild the drive with Disk Warrior. For some reason DW was able to see the drive when nothing else would.

Todd

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Thanks Todd, but as it mounts fine via the ethernet connection and I can see everything (albeit slowly with so many files in one folder I think that the drive is fine.

I’ve tried connecting it with it’s USB and USB2 inputs and both ways it can be seen in System Profiler but not with Disk Utility.

I’m not very good at knowing what is compatible with what, but it’s generally mounted as an AFP drive, could this be something to cause a problem?

Trev On 6 Aug 2008, at 22:53, Todd wrote:

I’ve had similar problems and the only solution that worked for me was to rebuild the drive with Disk Warrior. For some reason DW was able to see the drive when nothing else would.

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Some of these NAS devices are formatted as FAT32 (Windows) in order to be cross-platform. When you access them over the Ethernet, you are actually accessing an embedded file-server running on the drive, as if you installed a server on your network. That server would effectively hide the format of the disk from your computer, because your computer is not actually accessing the disk — the server is.

But Mac OS X has been able to access FAT32 for quite a few versions now, so I’m not sure what the issue really is here. Are you able to use other disks on this same USB port? Is it a USB1.1 port, and a USB2 device, maybe?

Walter

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All of the rest are fine. I’ve got 4 externals, but only this one being the NAS/USB1/USB2. The others are all Firewire/USB.

I’ve tried the cables in every conceivable slot, swapping ports on the mac, using a hub, connecting directly, daisychaining and all of the others are fine, just not the NAS/USB, which is viewable in system profiler but not Disk Utility.

As I mentioned before, it seems to be working okay as a NAS device, albeit slowly, and accessing folders on it seems to hang the finder for a few seconds, but I thought that this folder of retrieved 70,000 files may have been slowing a network drive down, hence my attempt to mount via the USB port.

Thanks for the reply anyway Walter. Trev On 7 Aug 2008, at 15:13, waltd wrote:

Some of these NAS devices are formatted as FAT32 (Windows) in order to be cross-platform. When you access them over the Ethernet, you are actually accessing an embedded file-server running on the drive, as if you installed a server on your network. That server would effectively hide the format of the disk from your computer, because your computer is not actually accessing the disk — the server is.

But Mac OS X has been able to access FAT32 for quite a few versions now, so I’m not sure what the issue really is here. Are you able to use other disks on this same USB port? Is it a USB1.1 port, and a USB2 device, maybe?

Walter

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