Mac OS X 10.4.7 Special Report: External drives not recognized -- fixes

CNET staff

Sept. 2, 2009 7:29 a.m. PT

3 min read

Several users have reported that external FireWire and/or USB hard drives will not mount after updating to Mac OS X 10.4.7.

MacFixIt reader Joseph Samuels writes:

"I did have some trouble with one of my two laptops recognizing my firewire drives. On the Pismo, with Daystar G4 550mhz upgrade and 1 GB ram, there were no problems. On my Powerbook G4, 1.67mhz, 2 GB ram, at first after the upgrade, the firewire drives were not recognized. I unplugged them all from the computer and restarted and tried them again and they all worked. For the first plug-in with each drive, it took some time for the machine to mount the drive. It seemed that the system had to do something to the drive before it could mount. But after the first plug-in for each drive, the later plug-ins were very quick like it had been before installing 10.4.7."

As noted by Joseph, the solution for some cases of this problem is to simply unplug the drives, restart and re-connect them.

In other cases, clearing system caches with a utility like AppleJack, Cocktail or Tiger Cache Cleaner can often restore accessibility to FireWire devices that otherwise refuse to mount.

You may also want to try some of the suggestions listed in our tutorial about solving various FireWire issues.

Index: