iMac and external Seagate Free agent drive - corrupts after reboot

bombstylz · Jan 12, 2012

Hello all.

Sorry if this is a stupid question, or one that has been asked before. I am a fairly new iMac user. iMac 27" with Lion, got it about 3 months ago (First MAC! and I Love it)

I have been using an external USB drive - Seagte Free Agent to run my time machine backups. All works well and good, but every time I reboot or shut down, the backups do not work again, and the external drive seems to be corrupt or something, and I have to verify and repair the disk. I think the issue is that when it reboots or shuts down, the disk is still mounted, so it just gets abruptly disconnected... I know I can manually unmount the drive before a restart or shutdown, but is there a way that the OS automatically unmounts the drive before the reboot? It is very frustrating that I have to keep doing this after any reboot or shut down.

any help is appreciated.

Thanks

chscag · Jan 12, 2012

That shouldn't be happening. When you reboot or shut down the drive is dismounted and will be remounted if it's attached when the system restarts. That should not cause corruption.

The drive may be defective. How new is it? I believe Seagate warrants their drives for either 2 or 3 years. You might consider asking Seagate for a RMA and replacement.

MontanaKarl · Feb 18, 2012

Same issue with Seagate

I've got the exact same issue with a Seagate GoFlex Desk 2 TB drive connected by FW 800 as a Time Machine backup drive. OS 10.7.3

In searching other forums for the past few weeks, the only suggestion I found was a formatting issue - someone claimed that reformatting with Disk Utility in Lion somehow did something different than the pre-formatted drive. Makes no sense to me - HFS format has not changed. But, I reformatted anyway...

The drive is fine through sleep/wake cycles. it is only for shutdown (or restart) that the drive fails - the background file system check runs for about an hour and finally reports that the drive cannot be repaired. Running Disk Utility to repair it again reports an "invalid map node", the drive gets repaired, but is then marked as 'read only'. Unmounting it, and repairing again, the drive refuses to mount. Ejecting it, removing power/data, and restoring power/data, it mounts and passes Verify without errors.

I removed the drive and it works fine with an external disk docking station. So, I think that there is something messed up with the controller that Seagate is using in its drive enclosures... That you're encountering the same thing with a FreeAgent USB device is a bit disturbing.

fguzman07 · Mar 9, 2012

MontanaKarl said:
I've got the exact same issue with a Seagate GoFlex Desk 2 TB drive connected by FW 800 as a Time Machine backup drive. OS 10.7.3

In searching other forums for the past few weeks, the only suggestion I found was a formatting issue - someone claimed that reformatting with Disk Utility in Lion somehow did something different than the pre-formatted drive. Makes no sense to me - HFS format has not changed. But, I reformatted anyway...

The drive is fine through sleep/wake cycles. it is only for shutdown (or restart) that the drive fails - the background file system check runs for about an hour and finally reports that the drive cannot be repaired. Running Disk Utility to repair it again reports an "invalid map node", the drive gets repaired, but is then marked as 'read only'. Unmounting it, and repairing again, the drive refuses to mount. Ejecting it, removing power/data, and restoring power/data, it mounts and passes Verify without errors.

I removed the drive and it works fine with an external disk docking station. So, I think that there is something messed up with the controller that Seagate is using in its drive enclosures... That you're encountering the same thing with a FreeAgent USB device is a bit disturbing.

I also have this problem with a Seagate external drive. On rebooting my iMac (Mac OS 6.8), the drive does not mount. Sometimes cycling power on the drive, or disconnecting it, or ejecting it, will fix the issue. Every time it behaves a little bit different, so after trying what worked last time, I have to start trying different things. It is a pain ...

Tom123 · Mar 10, 2012

bombstylz said:
Hello all.

Sorry if this is a stupid question, or one that has been asked before. I am a fairly new iMac user. iMac 27" with Lion, got it about 3 months ago (First MAC! and I Love it)

I have been using an external USB drive - Seagte Free Agent to run my time machine backups. All works well and good, but every time I reboot or shut down, the backups do not work again, and the external drive seems to be corrupt or something, and I have to verify and repair the disk. I think the issue is that when it reboots or shuts down, the disk is still mounted, so it just gets abruptly disconnected... I know I can manually unmount the drive before a restart or shutdown, but is there a way that the OS automatically unmounts the drive before the reboot? It is very frustrating that I have to keep doing this after any reboot or shut down.

I have the same thing happening here. I have the Seagate Free Agent 1.5TB model connected to my new iMac 10.7.3

I have tried several things but the only way it keeps working to keep my iMac computer in Energy Saver NEVER mode. I still use the screen saver at 10 minutes but as long as the computer stays on Time Machine works fine.

I even tried turning Time Machine Off and just manually doing a backup by selecting the Time Machine Icon on the top and doing a Manual Back up. It worked a couple times then hung up.

The only way I could fix the Seagate drive was to go into the iMac Disk Utility and Erase and reFormat the external Drive.

I spoke with Apple Care Support and they said to leave the computer on all the time. Do NOT use Sleep Mode. Hopefully Apple will come up with a fix. My guess it is a timing issue.

Not sure if it is just a problem with Seagate drives or with other USB drives as well.

Tom........

777twist · Jul 2, 2012

MontanaKarl said:
I've got the exact same issue with a Seagate GoFlex Desk 2 TB drive connected by FW 800 as a Time Machine backup drive. OS 10.7.3

In searching other forums for the past few weeks, the only suggestion I found was a formatting issue - someone claimed that reformatting with Disk Utility in Lion somehow did something different than the pre-formatted drive. Makes no sense to me - HFS format has not changed. But, I reformatted anyway...

So annoying... Because you all are using the same GoFlex drive, I think it's that. But I have had problems with other drives using the FW port.

Does reformatting under Lion actually fix the issue? I hate these external drives, I just can't trust them.

BSD Meister · Jul 3, 2012

I have another oddity that occurred only after I started using Lion. On one of my systems I have to be able to access numerous versions of OS X for my work, so I have a Maxtor One Touch 320G drive connected via FireWire with 4 - 80G partitions - one for Tiger, one for Leopard, and one for Snow Leopard, plus an extra for general data storage.

I used to have no problems whatsoever booting into any of these partitions UNTIL Lion was installed. Now, if I use Lion, the next time I try to boot into Leopard, the screen always appears in black and white, the video intensity is way down - it's sort of like a dark black and white image. The solution is to:

1. Boot from the Leopard install disk
2. Verify permissions, verify the disk, repair the permissions and the disk on the Leopard partition - this is ALWAYS needed. There are always errors.
3. Once done, it works normally....until I use Lion again.

I think this is a Lion issue and not necessarily a drive issue. The first megabytes of every hard drive keep the catalog and index files. Lion differs from it's predecessors in that it's constantly updating the file system to "save" the current status of the applications and the OS itself so it can (theoretically) restart right where you left off. This means it should be updating the files on the external drive as well. If your FireWire drives are like mine, if they're not in use and you're using your internal hard drive, they put themselves to sleep. If Lion doesn't recognize this (which would be a bug) then when you shut down, it will likely fire up the sleeping drive and then update the catalog and index files with BAD/INCOMPLETE information. NOTE: This is total speculation on my part!

Why Lion is picking on Leopard and yet leaving the Tiger and Snow Leopard partitions alone is a mystery to me.

File a bug with Apple, and contact the vendor about the problem for now. If you're using your drives strictly as backup drives, you might want to turn the drive on only when you're ready to back up, then unmount it and turn it off before shutdown. It's a PIA, I know, but it might work.

Cheers, cool guys! :Cool:

ert · Sep 7, 2012

Same issue with Seagate

MontanaKarl described precisely my problem - I have a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Desk 2 TB FireWire 800 External Hard Drive that I've been trying to use for Time Machine backups for the past 11 months. It happens almost every time I unmount the drive. It drives me nuts and I don't trust my backups.

When I originally bought this drive around Halloween, I thought I had a bad drive, and replaced it a week later. When the second one had the same problem, I started looking for issues with my computer, and haven't found anything. Repeated reformats under Lion didn't make the problem go away (but it did allow an initial mount and backup). I was hopeful that Mountain Lion might fix the issue, but no such luck.

Disk Utility is never able to repair the volume, I always have to use a third party disk tool. Removing the power was something that I hadn't tried before and it did just work, I'll try that a few times now.

iMac and external Seagate Free agent drive - corrupts after reboot

bombstylz

chscag

Well-known member

MontanaKarl

fguzman07

Tom123

777twist

BSD Meister

ert

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