can't find hard drive

help! I got a mac pro running 10.5.6 with three internal hard drives. hard drive 3 is missing. I do not see the image on the desktop. in disc utility, I can see it but not mount it. verify and repairing the disc fails. also the name of the disc changed from "hard drive 3" to "disk1s2". I also switched the drive to another bay to no avail. Any help would be greatly appreciated as I have many gigs of files that are not backed up (i know, stupid).

let fsck have a go first, look for the entry called If All Above Attempts Have Failed or Working On a Non-Boot Volume in the following page

Repairing an OS X Volume or Drive | Ninjamurai

That happened to me too! Awful condition I was in- distress!!

Anyway, DONT PANIC - I have the solution!
Firstly, check that the icon isn't hidden, to do that, you are going to need to open up Terminal. You will find it here:

Applications --> Utilities.

Once Terminal is opened, you are going to need to get it to show all hidden icons. To do this type this into Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool true

Then, relaunch Finder, and type this command:

killall Finder

(These commands are case sensitive!)

Now, HOPEFULLY, your third internal Hard drive should show up on the desktop, along with few other files. You may not have seen these files before, but DO NOT delete them - MAC OS X needs them to perform correctly.

Once the problem is fixed, you may want to re-hide those other files that appeared on your desktop. To do that, reopen Terminal and type in the following command:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool false

Then, relaunch Terminal, and type in the following command:

killall Finder

!!! Remember, these commands are case sensitive !!!



Hope this helped!

Good Luck!

thanks but, neither of these seemed to help. ran disk warrior as well as drive genius.

disk utility can still see the drive

disk warrior gives me this error
"directory cannot be rebuilt due to hardware failure (-36, 2286)"

and in terminal df -dl gives me

Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/disk2s2 233Gi 213Gi 20Gi 92% /
/dev/disk1s2 698Gi 518Gi 180Gi 75% /Volumes/Hard Disc 2

while diskutil list gives this. note disk 0 is the one that is lost

/dev/disk0
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *698.6 Gi disk0
1: EFI 200.0 Mi disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Hard Disc 3 698.3 Gi disk0s2
/dev/disk1
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *698.6 Gi disk1
1: EFI 200.0 Mi disk1s1
2: Apple_HFS Hard Disc 2 698.3 Gi disk1s2
/dev/disk2
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *232.9 Gi disk2
1: EFI 200.0 Mi disk2s1
2: Apple_HFS Mac Pro 232.6 Gi disk2s2

at this point is all lost?

Sounds like you need a new HDD to me. Important data may be recoverable using the right tools or done professionally.

well, if the HD isn't hidden, could you have possibly accidentally ejected it?
Maybe you right clicked (ctrl clicked) and clicked eject by accident without realising. I did that with my original Macintosh HD drive and managed to find it by showing hidden items in terminal.