Success resolving drive mounting issues with removal of ATI Radeon 9800 card; may be fixed in Mac OS X 10.3.5

Continuing our coverage of an issue where some systems can mount drives or disk images, but they are not viewable in the Finder sidebar nor on the desktop, we have received more notes confirming that (in some instances) removing the ATI Radeon 9800 card resolves the issue.

MacFixIt reader Michael Schoenfeld writes "I removed the ATI 9800 Mac SE card which I put in, (installed to upgrade my 9600 stock card), and my Dual 2 gig G5 OSX 10.3.4 is now behaving perfectly. All drives are now visibly mounting, as expected. Only change I have made."

Another reader writes "Tonight I pulled out my Radeon 9800 256MB Special Edition and reinstalled the original Radeon 9600. The drive/optical/image mounting issue in OS X 10.3.4 is gone. Everything mounts to the Finder instantly now.

"I can only assume there is be a bug in the ATI/Apple video drivers for cards with greater than 128MB of RAM (9800SE and 9800XT). But its just a guess. Deleting the various caches that have been suggested across the 'net did not help, yet replacing the video card solved the issue instantly."

We've also received word that this issue may be fixed in Mac OS X 10.3.5, which is not yet released.

Using the "df" command in Terminal Some users have also reported that using the terminal command "df" -- which displays various data for a given drive, including the number of total bytes, and the percentage of disk space used -- sometimes results in the drive properly mounting in the Finder sidebar and on the desktop.

For more information on the "df" command you can type "man df" from the command line in Terminal.app.

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