Unable to mount external drive.

[llessurb]

I've been searching for an answer to this situation but haven't been able to find it in any of the forums. I have a Western Digital Caviar SE 250GB drive in a Rosewill USB 2.0 external enclosure and the drive will not show up in Finder. I go into Disk Utility and it shows up there but the drive is grayed out. When I go to mount it, I get an error that it is unable to mount and to try First Aid. I do that and everything looks fine, but still won't mount. I purchased DiskWarrior 4.0 and booted it up, but the drive does not show up in the list. I can rule out the external enclosure because it also happens with another enclosure using both USB & FireWire 400, on multiple machines (Macs & Pcs), and more importantly, I also have another Seagate 300gb drive that works fine in the same enclosure.

I'm fresh out of ideas at this point. Has anyone had any experience with this situation, where the drive appears to be fine, shows up in Disk Utility, but will not mount? Just trying to at least save the data.

I tried some diskutil commands from terminal just to show what's going on, and the only thing I noticed out of the ordinary was that it says "Volume Free Space: 0 B (0 Bytes) (exactly 0 512-Byte-Blocks)":

brussell@brussell ~$ diskutil info MediaMovies
Device Identifier: disk1s3
Device Node: /dev/disk1s3
Part Of Whole: disk1
Device / Media Name: Untitled

Volume Name: MediaMovies
Escaped with Unicode: MediaMovies

Mounted: No

File System: Journaled HFS+
Type: hfs
Name: Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
Owners: Disabled

Partition Type: Apple_HFS
Bootable: Not bootable
Media Type: Generic
Protocol: USB
SMART Status: Not Supported
Volume UUID: 1A1A3E5D-8826-3F4F-A8A0-448553F68251

Total Size: 249.9 GB (249925091328 Bytes) (exactly 488134944 512-Byte-Blocks)
Volume Free Space: 0 B (0 Bytes) (exactly 0 512-Byte-Blocks)

Read-Only Media: No
Read-Only Volume: Not applicable (not mounted)
Ejectable: Yes

Whole: No
Internal: No

brussell@brussell ~$ diskutil mount MediaMovies
Volume on disk1s3 failed to mount
brussell@brussell ~$ diskutil eject MediaMovies
Disk MediaMovies ejected
brussell@brussell ~$ diskutil mount MediaMovies
Volume on disk1s3 failed to mount
brussell@brussell ~$ diskutil eject MediaMovies
Disk MediaMovies ejected
brussell@brussell ~$ diskutil unmount MediaMovies
disk1s3 was already not mounted
brussell@brussell ~$ diskutil mount MediaMovies
Volume on disk1s3 failed to mount
brussell@brussell ~$ diskutil verifyVolume MediaMovies
Started filesystem verification on disk1s3 MediaMovies
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume
Checking extents overflow file
Checking catalog file
Checking multi-linked files
Checking catalog hierarchy
Checking extended attributes file
Checking volume bitmap
Checking volume information
The volume MediaMovies appears to be OK
Finished filesystem verification on disk1s3 MediaMovies
brussell@brussell ~$ diskutil repairVolume MediaMovies
Started filesystem repair on disk1s3 MediaMovies
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume
Checking extents overflow file
Checking catalog file
Checking multi-linked files
Checking catalog hierarchy
Checking extended attributes file
Checking volume bitmap
Checking volume information
The volume MediaMovies appears to be OK
Volume repair complete
Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required
Finished filesystem repair on disk1s3 MediaMovies
brussell@brussell ~$ diskutil mount MediaMovies
Volume on disk1s3 failed to mount

 

[llessurb]

Well, it turns out I spoke too soon! I tried to install the DiskWarrior software and run it instead of booting off of the DVD, and this time it found the drive and restored it! What a great piece of software! The drive now mounts correctly and I have access to all of the files.