External HDD Won't Unmount, Can't Access

I'm running a MacBook1,1 with Tiger. I always shut it down at night, but the other night I left is hibernating and made a dumb mistake, I unplugged my external and the next morning opened the computer and it came out of hibernation with a warning saying a device was removed incorrectly. (obviously the external was still mounted.

So now when I plug the drive in, my HFS+ partition automounts to the desktop (I also have a FAT32 partition that will does not automount anymore), but I can't access it, Finder locks up, need to relaunch. I open disk utility to try and fix the disk disk utility locks up have to force quit. Tried to access the partition via terminal, shows both partitions mounted, but terminal locks up when I CD to either partition. Tried to unmount via terminal (sudo diskutil unmount /Volumes/DriveName) and terminal locks up. Tried the same thing in the terminal on my recovery disk, same problem. Had to force quit terminal. Checked ownership and permissions, all are correct.

The drive mounts, reads, and writes correctly on Ubuntu, but OS X is having some real issues. I can reformat if needed, but obviously the file system is ok, I'd like to fix whatever is wrong so OS X access it correctly again.

Any thoughts?

::bump::

I'd really like to be able to recover this data, anyone have any ideas before I call it a bust and have to download 50GBs of iso's all over again?

FAT32 volumes have a high risk of getting corrupted if they aren't umounted properly. I'd wager that there's nothing wrong with your HFS+ volume... you just can't access it because the FInder is locked up trying to mount the FAT32 volume.

You say Ubuntu mounts and reads the drive correctly... why not use Ubuntu to back up the partitions and then reformat them?

lifeisabeach said:

FAT32 volumes have a high risk of getting corrupted if they aren't umounted properly. I'd wager that there's nothing wrong with your HFS+ volume... you just can't access it because the FInder is locked up trying to mount the FAT32 volume.

You say Ubuntu mounts and reads the drive correctly... why not use Ubuntu to back up the partitions and then reformat them?

Click to expand...

ok, so is there any way to prevent the drive from auto mounting? that way I can manual mount the HFS+ and back up before reformatting?

I don't want to use ubuntu just because it's on an old P3 machine with 256mb of ram and it will take forever to transfer that much data. Tried it once, I have to do it essentially file by file or the system locks up.

I can if I have to, just trying to avoid it.

EDIT:
What about this page? I know fstab.hd is empty in Tiger, can I really just create and fstab? Would OS X read it on boot, or just ignore the file? that would be excessively simple.

dgortze380 said:

ok, so is there any way to prevent the drive from auto mounting? that way I can manual mount the HFS+ and back up before reformatting?

I don't want to use ubuntu just because it's on an old P3 machine with 256mb of ram and it will take forever to transfer that much data. Tried it once, I have to do it essentially file by file or the system locks up.

I can if I have to, just trying to avoid it.

EDIT:
What about this page? I know fstab.hd is empty in Tiger, can I really just create and fstab? Would OS X read it on boot, or just ignore the file? that would be excessively simple.

Click to expand...

I didn't see the page that you presumably meant to link to, but here's a hint from MacOSXHints that demonstrates how to use fstab to stop a volume from mounting. I've not used it myself, but sounds like it's worth trying.
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060930150059172

lifeisabeach said:

I didn't see the page that you presumably meant to link to, but here's a hint from MacOSXHints that demonstrates how to use fstab to stop a volume from mounting. I've not used it myself, but sounds like it's worth trying.
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060930150059172

Click to expand...

sorry, that is the page I meant to link to. for anyone wondering I was NOT able to get fstab or fstab.hd to work in 10.4 Tiger.

I don't know why I didn't think of this sooner but my solution is as follows.

Boot Ubuntu.
Back-up FAT32 partition to HFS+ partition.
Use dd command to write zeros to FAT32 Partition. (dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb2)
Reboot to OS X, FAT32 still won't mount or unmount but I now have access to my HFS+
Backup HFS+ to MacBook HDD
Reformat and never again use a FAT32 partition.