External Harddrive not mounting...

Hello mac gods,

Yet again I have an issue that I can't resolve without your help.

The story: My old computer died and I converted to Mac. I had the hard drive removed and now use it as an external for my mac. I had it formatted to work with my mac and have been using it for a few months now but last night it said that it won't mount.

I have tried first aid but no joy, it keeps coming up with the message:

Invalid sibling link
Volume check failed
Error: File system verify or repair failed

I have pictures and movies that I don't want to delete on there.

Mac nerds what do I do?

Cheers,

MacNewbie

Well since its not a boot disk you don't have to boot up from the DVD, you can try this from the Terminal app in Utilities:

Go to Utilities in Applications and run Terminal.

Type df ; this will list the drives attached to the mac eg on mine I have 3 drives
/dev/disk0s10
/dev/disk1s10
/dev/disk2s3

Identify which drive you are having issues with by its size and unmount it (if it is not already unmounted) umount /dev/disk2s3, replacing /dev/disk2s3 with whatever disk you are fixing.

Type fsck_hfs -r /dev/disk2s3 again replacing /dev/disk2s3 with whatever diskyou are fixing.

give that a go

To the OP:

Sounds like the drive has decided to go south. If what louishen advised you to do doesn't work, you might want to try using a third party utility to see if you can access the drive and copy the data you need from it. What file system is the drive using?

Regards.

How do I know which disk it is?

This is what information I get:

Name : ST340083 3AS Media
Type : Disk

Partition Map Scheme : Master Boot Record
Disk Identifier : disk1
Media Name : ST340083 3AS Media
Media Type : Generic
Connection Bus : USB
USB Serial Number : 222258F2425C
Device Tree : /PCI0/EHC1@1D,7/@3:0
Writable : Yes
Ejectable : Yes
Mac OS 9 Drivers Installed : No
Location : External
Total Capacity : 372.6 GB (400,088,457,216 Bytes)
S.M.A.R.T. Status : Not Supported
Disk Number : 1
Partition Number : 0

when I type df this is what I get:

Filesystem 512-blocks Used Available Capacity Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2 624470624 256065600 367893024 42% /
devfs 212 212 0 100% /dev
fdesc 2 2 0 100% /dev
map -hosts 0 0 0 100% /net
map auto_home 0 0 0 100% /home

macnewbie1978 said:

when I type df this is what I get:

Filesystem 512-blocks Used Available Capacity Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2 624470624 256065600 367893024 42% /
devfs 212 212 0 100% /dev
fdesc 2 2 0 100% /dev
map -hosts 0 0 0 100% /net
map auto_home 0 0 0 100% /home

Click to expand...

The mac is only seeing the start up drive, unfortunatelly

louishen said:

The mac is only seeing the start up drive, unfortunatelly

Click to expand...

Is there anything I can do to sort this out?

See if these demo apps can see any of the files

Mac Data Recovery Software, Mac Data Rescue, Digital Data Recovery Disk for Mac
FileSalvage - Mac OS X Data Recovery, Undelete Files, Rescue Lost Data