Internal hard drives don't appear on desktop after restart

[Tuppy]

I have a 2 TB SSD startup disk inside my 2010 Mac Pro tower, along with three conventional 8TB hard drives. The OS is 10.11.6 El Capitan.

Strange thing: all the drives show up on the desktop on a normal cold start, but if the Mac is running, and I restart it, only the startup drive appears on the desktop. In order to make the other three drives appear again, I have to shut the machine down completely, and then start it back up again.

This happened after I moved all my drives from one Mac Pro tower to another, better one (same year, mid-2010, but with more processors, cores, and memory). I simply pulled all four drives out of the first tower and inserted them into the second one, and started it up.

Of course, all the software detected that it was in a different Mac and demanded fresh license codes and reactivation, but I provided those, and now all the apps work just as they did in the other Mac. In fact everything seems to be working normally except for the fact that on a restart only the startup drive appears.

What might be causing this odd restart behavior, and how might it be cured?

Thanks for any help!

Tup

 

[Randy B. Singer]

That used to be a common problem. It was due to a timing issue on restart. You can use a utility to mount your external hard drives when they won't mount:

Mountain ($6)

Mountain

appgineers.de

Or you can issue this command in Terminal:


diskutil mount /dev/disk2s1

Volume VM Drive on /dev/disk2s1 mounted


Or you can create a simple AppleScript and save it as a compiled script to issue the above command.

 

[Tuppy]

Thanks much for the help, Randy!

Since I'm not Mac savvy enough to write AppleScripts or confident enough go into Terminal and issue keyboard commands, I guess I'll buy Mountain. I looked at its webpage, and it appears to be a useful app for more than just mounting AWOL drives.

I guess there's no simple trick for just correcting the restart timing problem, then? Such as maybe going into the Mac's Restore mode (holding down the Option key on startup and choosing Restore), and then reinstalling the System (hopefully without disturbing anything else on the startup drive?)

I actually tried that, but when I chose Reinstall the OS, I got a message that El Capitan is "temporarily unavailable" from the App Store, or wherever Apple was keeping it for download. So I can't reinstall the System, but maybe there's some other, permanent way to correct the timing problem on restart, that you can think of?

Anyway thanks again for the tip on Mountain. I'd never heard of it before, but it does look useful, so I'll go get it now.

Best wishes,

Tom

 

[Tuppy]

Well, rats. Mountain can't find the missing drives after restarts either, just like Disk Utility. Those unseen drives must be pretty well hidden, somewhere, if neither of these apps can detect them after a restart. And if they can't detect them, they can't mount them.

So I guess the best course of action, under these circumstances, is to just never restart this Mac, at least not deliberately. And if it does restart itself for some reason, causing the internal hard drives to disappear from the desktop, then I'll shut the computer down completely and start up again to make all the drives show up. It seems to be the only sure way to do it.

Should any other, permanent cure for this restart malady occur to you, or you think of something else to try, please let me know.

What do you think of that idea of reinstalling the System from the Restore drive? Worth a try? Or does Apple no longer support downloads of earlier operating systems from its website?

Thanks again,

Tom

 

[harryb2448]

What does Finder > Preferences > General > Hard Disks show? Is the box ticked?

 

[Tuppy]

I had forgotten about those Finder prefs, but I just checked, and yes, that box is ticked, along with all the rest of them. So that's not the trouble.

Thanks for the suggestion, though. Any others you might think of would be welcome.

Tom

 

[MacInWin]

You could try dragging the disk icon to your login items in System Preferences/Users & Groups. That, for me, serves to mount two network drives on login. Might work for your internals, too.

 

[ferrarr]

I use DriveDx, and they have this, which talks about macOS Big Sur and external drives.

Knowledge base « BinaryFruit

binaryfruit.com

In order for DriveDx to see the drives after start up or restart, they need to be unmounted then mounted after login.

 

[Horsa]

It doesn't seem surprising to me that Mountain (a utility designed to find and manage external drives) doesn't solve the problem. Tuppy's 3 x 8TB drives are internal ones, plugged into the Mac Pro drive bays.

Tuppy, I suspect (as, I think, you do too) that the problem has its root cause in the fact that you transplanted your system drive from one machine to another. I've no idea why this should be the case, mind you. I run El Capitan (a fresh install) on a 2008 Mac Pro and it's never had a problem mounting internal drives.

One further thought: apart from when doing diagnostic stuff like safe mode etc., I rarely, if ever, have cause to re-start my machine. I usually either boot from cold or use sleep mode. Is there any reason why you're having to use re-start with any frequency?

 

[MarkAllread]

It doesn't seem surprising to me that Mountain (a utility designed to find and manage external drives) doesn't solve the problem. Tuppy's 3 x 8TB drives are internal ones, plugged into the Mac Pro drive bays.

Hey @Horsa, Mountain sees and mounts all my internal drives with no problems, it has some other capabilities as well such as enabling a volume NOT to mount at startup. It does this by editing the vifs file which up to a couple of years ago I did through terminal. Worth the price of entry just for that. Using a Mac Pro with many volumes it is a very useful utility for both internal and external drives, including NVME.
But as Tuppy said, if it can’t see them, it can’t mount them.

@Tuppy Here’s a couple of thoughts FWIW.

-First, I regularly swap several drives between three Mac Pro’s and I’ve never had a problem mounting any of them. I have to say though that none of them have been 8GB drives....edit: oops, I mean 8TB of course

-Have you tried creating another bootable volume on one of your drives to see if it mounts.
-If one of the drives doesn’t have much on it, have you tried copying the contents to another drive and then completely erasing and reformatting it. That will change the UUID (as will a new volume)
-Have you tried them one at a time (ie, remove the other two)

 

[Horsa]

@MarkAllread - As the man with the surgical support said, I stand corrected.

 

[Tuppy]

Well, MacInWin, I tried dragging the disk icons to the login items in System Preferences/Users & Groups, as you suggested, but that didn't make the drives appear on restarts, so I guess I'll have to keep looking for other solutions. Thanks for the suggestion though.

Horsa, I do suspect that my simply transplanting the boot drive from the old computer to the new one is the source of this problem. As you say, there's no real reason to restart the computer very often, but what worries me is that if it's a little flaky on restarts, it might be flaky in other ways, ways that might endanger (corrupt) important files later. I'd really like the OS to behave the way it's supposed to before I try to do any serious work on this machine.

Mark Allread, I tried to put a bootable volume on one of my other three drives, but I couldn't do it. I found in my Applications folder an "Install OS El Capitan.app," and tried to use it to install the OS on Drive #4, which is only a backup for Drive #3. Trouble is, the only drive that the installer app offers to install the OS on is the boot drive itself, which of course already has it. The installer apparently can't see the other three drives for some reason, so it doesn't offer to install an OS on them.

So, here's a thought. What if I did allow the installer put the OS onto the boot drive, right on top of the OS that's already there? Do you suppose that would correct things? Would it leave everything else on the drive alone (all the apps, users, settings, etc.)? I was afraid that in the process of installing a new OS on top of the old one, it might wipe the drive of everything else. I have a ton of apps in the Application Folder that I'd hate to have to install all over again.

Re your second suggestion, do you mean that if I erase (reformat) one of the other drives in the computer, and then drag the entire contents of the boot drive onto it, then use Disk Utility to erase and reformat the original boot drive, and then drag the OS back onto it, the problem might be corrected? Since, as I said, drive #4 is only a backup drive, I could certainly wipe and reformat it and do that. It would only leave Drive #3 un-backed-up for a short while.

Which of those two courses of action do you think might have the best chance of success?

 

[Horsa]

Reviewing what you've told us, @Tuppy - especially the bit about the OS installer being unable to see the other 3 drives - one simple fact stands out: the problem only emerged after you moved all your drives to a different machine. In your previous Mac Pro, everything worked as expected. In the new one, it doesn't. That suggests a hardware/logic board issue with the new machine. Not the sort of news you're wanting to hear, I know, but it is kinda the elephant in the room IMO.

If the installer app can't see the other 3 drives, then it seems to me that it can't be a fault with your existing installation of El Capitan. However, just to be thorough... are you trying to run the installer app from its location on the system drive? Could you try transferring the app onto a USB stick and running it/booting from there? I'm just trying to take the existing OS installation out of the equation, to see if that makes a difference.

 

[MarkAllread]

@Tuppy. I’ve done a little reading about 8TB drives in a Mac Pro and there does seem to be a few issues with some large drives during a restart.
Randy B. Singer alluded to timing issues in his post which may be related. For example I found a post that says this:

"In my opinion, many really large disks are seen by their manufacturers as "Server" disks, intended to run 24/7. So the manufacturers have not put any money into the electronic brake that traditionally slows drives down when they are dismounted.
I believe that because they have not finished spinning down, they are not ready to spin up again unless you have endured the slightly longer delay of a Shutdown/Restart.”

One post I read said the problem started when they moved up from Snow Leopard with a large drive.
Other posts referred to a pin 3 power issue causing boot up issues on specific drives.

There seems to be quite a body of knowledge out there that would be worth exploring
You might want to perform a search for your specific drives being used in your Mac Pro. It may just be as simple as an incompatible drive in a specific version of Mac Pro.

@Horsa ’s suggestion is a good one...Nevertheless, it may still be worthwhile first to take 2 out and reformat one (doesn’t need to be a boot drive) and see what happens. If you still can’t see it you might just be faced with using them externally or always having to shut down rather than restart.

I wouldn’t go messing with your current boot drive at this point (unless you have a good clone of course. CCC is your friend).

 

[Horsa]

I would second @MarkAllread's previous suggestion: i.e. that you copy off all the files from the emptiest of your storage drives, then unplug the other two and erase/format the drive. Don't try to install anything on it yet: just format it, leave it empty and then do a re-start to see if the system recognizes it.

BTW, when those 3 drives are visible/accessible (after a cold boot, for example), have you put any of them through the usual diagnostic/first-aid regime in Disk Utility?

 

[MarkAllread]

BTW, when those 3 drives are visible/accessible (after a cold boot, for example), have you put any of them through the usual diagnostic/first-aid regime in Disk Utility?

Haha, good one. I think we all assumed that had been done....maybe not!

 

[Tuppy]

Thanks much, Horsa and MacAllread. Yes, I not only ran Disk Utility’s First Aid through all these drives but I also ran Disk Warrior through the three 8TB drives. These apps found nothing wrong with the drives.

Okay, I just took drives #2 and #3 out of the Mac, leaving only #4 and the startup drive (which is a new 2TB Crucial MX500 SSD that worked fine in the old box). By the way drives 2, 3, and 4 are all the same: Western Digital 8TB Ultrastar SATA 7200 RPM Enterprise-class drives. My old Mac had no trouble with any of them—they behaved like any of the smaller drives I’ve had in that box over the years.

Then I had Disk Utility erase and reformat Drive #4. I then restarted the Mac several times, and Drive 4 still never showed up on the desktop on any of the restarts, just like before. However, it does show up just fine on cold starts, just like before. So nothing has changed.

Another little glitch is now showing up with this “new” Mac. It now takes several pushes on the startup button before it will start. The first push usually does nothing, nor does pushing and holding the button a while. In most cases (it’s unpredictable) it requires poking at the button several times while saying bad words before the computer will start up. If this is just a problem with the switch itself, maybe I can take a switch out of one of the old G5 boxes that I have out in the garage, and switch switches.

But this new switch trouble, plus the possibility of a faulty logic board or other hardware problem, is making this “new” machine seem less and less attractive to me now. The whole point of this exercise—switching from my old Mac Pro to a supposedly more capable one—was to gain some speed while doing such things as rendering video in Final Cut Studio, or speeding up the Adobe CS6 suite of programs, and any other benefits of a faster Mac.

And in fact those programs do seem “snappier” in this new Mac Pro, from what little I’ve done with them so far. Here is the difference between the two boxes:

My “old” Mac Pro is a mid-2010 2.28 GHz Quad-core Intel Xeon with 32 GB of memory.

This “new” Mac Pro is a mid-2010 2 X 3.33GHz 6-core Intel Xeon with 64 GB of memory.

I realize that I can switch the memory from one box to the other, but the “new” Mac not only has a faster processor, it has two of them, as well as another couple of cores, whatever cores are (more cores sounds good).

I was hoping this would be a faster Mac because I spend a lot of time in Final Cut Studio 3, creating videos with a lot of special effects in them, and some of my videos are two hours long. Video, as you know if you’ve done any, requires a lot of rendering that can really slow the work down.

I’ve also been using InDesign to create books, one of them 800 pages long with 375 maps and photos, with the photos and other illustrations being prepared in Photoshop. Big books with that many pages can get pretty sluggish when you’re working on them.

So, when a relative donated me this “new” Mac, I heard the siren song of a faster and more capable computer, and thought that all I had to do get it was move the drives from my old machine to the new one.

And actually (once it’s running) this “new” Mac behaves fine except for not being able to see the three 8TB drives after a restart. That is no big deal, of course, because it always sees them on a cold start, but it makes me wonder whether something else might not be working right in this Mac’s brain. I’d sure hate to have a 500-page book, for example, or a two-hour video corrupted in the end by a bad logic board or something.

So, what would you guys do in my place? Are the benefits to be gained by this “new” Mac worth all the trouble of sorting out these problems? Or would it be best to just go back back to the slower, but tried-and-true, Mac that I was using before? After all, the turtle beats the hare if the hare won’t run, or if he has a defective motherboard.

 

[MarkAllread]

If I was really concerned about the mother board this might be a solution....

As you probably know, you can also swap the cpu trays. If both your macs are genuine 5.1s (which yours are) then you can put the dual cpu tray into the single cpu mac. The dual cpu tray is probably worth more than your old, single cpu computer. A quick google search will show you how....easy peasy!

Not sure why you are still using El Cap (probably your app needs it) but you might try a smaller drive and put Mojave on it. You could also try Snow Leopard (which from what I read seemed ok). You could do all this in your old mac and then move it to your "new" mac. It will rule out the existing OS.
Time to get creative ;-)

 

[Horsa]

If it weren't for the switch-on issue (anything PSU related is a red flag to me) I'd be saying stick with the newer machine and just don't do re-starts if you can help it.

If replacing that power switch is an easy job and sorts the problem, great. If it's a huge faff and/or doesn't fix it, go back to Old Faithful. The last thing you need is a PSU going bang in mid job, potentially taking out other parts of the machine.

 

[MacInWin]

I will go contrarian here and say that nothing in this issue points to any problem with the motherboard. Just a warm start problem with sleeping drives not responding fast enough for the OS. I would get something like Amphetamine to keep the drives awake, then set the CPU not to sleep in System Preferences/Power (I forget how El Cap labelled it, but what you want is to keep the CPU from sleeping when the display is darkened. The rest of the machine will keep running. Amphetamine will keep the drives spinning. Try that to see if they stay attached on a restart on wakeup, and avoid warm reboots.