Mac Mini :: Finder Failures And External USB Disks
Jun 10, 2012
My 2009 mac-mini started acting up about 2 months ago.The symptoms were:
-- slow response
-- freezing for no apparent reason the going again
-- failure to shutdown forcing use of the power button
-- long boot times
-- finder would freeze and could not be relaunched
-- iTunes would not quit
-- trying to view files on external drives may take an excessive time
I tried "everything" to try to resolve the problem.None of this worked:
-- zapped the parameter ram
-- cleared disk permissions
-- repaired disks
-- booted to safe mode
-- ran fsck
-- reinstalled Snow Leopard
There were several articles that discussed how to "reliably restart the finder". urls....Although none of the suggestions in the article or in the discussion provided any relief, I was finally convinced that I needed to disconnect all of my external drives and reboot.It appears that we have finally discovered the culprit.I have 4 external drives:
-Seagate GoFlex 3TB USB
-Seagate GoFlex 2TB USB
-Seagate 1.5TB Firewire
Toshiba 0.5TB USB (Used for Carbon Copy Clone of the internal drive)Booting from this drive did not change the problem.With all of them removed my computer worked just fine.Adding back the 3TB USB and the 1.5TB Firewire, I still have a working system.Since discovery of this error, I've found several articles complaining that this bug has been around long enough that it should have been fixed by now.Apparently Apple points fingers at the disk drive maker and the drive makers point back at Apple.Refering back to the article above, (the HTTP link), these same symptoms seem to appear because of some rogue applications.It -may- be that because I am using Crashplan 3.2.1 to backup this "broken" disk to another locally attached disk, that Crashplan is the "rogue" application.However, I've been using Crashplan for nearly 3 years and have found it to be a great app -- much more reliable than Time Machine (which proved to be nearly worthless when my MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard died and was replaced with a MacBook Pro running Lion.
I did a software update for Safari to 5.1.5. I rebooted the system as required. Now neither the firewire external drive, nor the USB external drive are mounted.Â
They both spin and click several times and then stop. The disk utility does not see them. Power cycling the disks does not help.
I have been troubleshooting this issue. It has something to do with Finder and disks,Running Mac Pro 5,1 with Mavericks 10.9,3 with 10Gb RAM (2x1Gb stock + 2x4Gb), SSD for primary OS drive, 2 TB HDD for Home folder. Have a few other HDD's in the Mac Pro and an external drive for Time MachineÂ
Problems include;Disk Images no longer unmountHard drives (SSD, Home HD, Bootcamp drive) no longer list contents in Finder although Time Machine drive, and 2 other HDD's do list contentsDisk Utility freezes when launched (Freezes at Gathering disk information...)When trying to reboot, Finder becomes unresponsive and can't quit, when force quit, hangs on Grey screen pre-spin progress indicator and required hard shutdown (power button for several seconds)Â
Tried fixes (in order of trying);Reinstalled fresh copy of MavericksSwitched HD for Home folder (it was giving me SMART warnings)Switched HD's around within the MacZap PRAMInstalled Mavericks on a single drive and things seemed to work fine for several days, so I thought it was my SSDReplaced SSD and reinstalled OS, But now after a day it's doing it againÂ
Other info : I am running CrashPlan which seems to be able to read the disks and back up files (so it seems).Time Machine seems to be backing everything up on schedule..I can run Terminal command "diskutil list" and all the drives show up..I can mount new dmg files, but the contents do not show up but the drive does show up in the Terminal command
When I go to eject them, they stay shown in Finder but are no longer listed in the Terminal command.Activity Monitor shows Disk Utility as hanging, but no other odd indicators.Memory Pressure shows low green in the graph.When I hard shutdown and startup again, everything works for awhile perfectly, but then the problems start showing up.
I have a unibody MBP with Snow Leopard on it. I haven't put a disk in it in a long time but tonight when I did, it slowly spins, etc and then ejects it in about 15 seconds. It doesn't show up in finder at all.
I first put in my snow leopard disk, then a dvd, then a music cd... nothing.
I went to the finder preferences and made sure everything looked ok, but no joy.
Purchased a used macbook aluminum did not come with disks but i have the discs of my mac mini 2010 aluminum.I tried erasing and installing but it did not work.It says i cannot mac osx on this computer.
I got my Mac Mini from my moms friend (for free) so I don't have the disks that came with the computer, but I do have the Snow Leopard upgrade disk and the disks that came with the new MacBook Pro's if that helps. How would I go about doing a clean install on my Mac Mini?
I'm about to get a Mac Mini Server for audio, video, and graphic production, in addition to everyday productivity use. If in the same situation, which would you prefer?
1) to stripe (Raid 0) the two internal disks, or
2) use one as the install/OS disk and the other as the data/scratch disk?
(...assuming you have a 1TB external backup drive, and find FW800 to be much slower than internal SATA for a data/scratch disk).
Wondering if anyone knows what the security policy and process is that is followed by Apple when a damaged hard disk is replaced by Apple. Is the disk destroyed, or demagnetized. How do we know that the data on the disk is will not be accessed and copied anywhere? Is there a stated policy document available somewhere in the Apple Store that discusses this?
I was trying to burn a new cd and before I used the application I had inserted a blank disk which my computer didn't recognize. When I tried the application to burn the burn folder, I got a message to insert a blank disk. I tried using the Disk Utility, but when I try to select the volume Superdrive, the option is dimmed. How do I eject the blank disk from my Superdrive? I tried restarting but that did not eject it.
I have 5 external USB disks on my little Mac Mini, and I've noted that if I don't access them for a time they spin down, and the next time I access them I have to wait for them to spin back up again. I don't care for that, and would rather they stayed spun up.
Is there some system setting or UNIX trick I can use to bring that about? Seems there should be?
i installed 10.6.3 on my 17" MacBook Pro (updating from 10.5.8). All my external disk drives which had all been visible to the system and accessible before the update no longer were visible to the OS. Not in the sidebar and not in the disk utility. After checking all connections etc. many reboots, resetting the pram i still am unable to see or access these disks. From there i updated to 10.6.8 but exactly the same results. i'm not sure where to go from here. i have 4 externals on 2 different usb routers and 1 external on a firewire router. I'm considering removing the routers and trying each drive separately and directly connected to the laptop.Â
I have had this issue for years now on all my Macs.
It happens to me with my current iMac intel, which has 2 firewire drives connected to it (one 800 and one 400).
When the firewire drives randomly spin it, it sometimes makes my iMac stall a bit. Like the beach-ball will sometimes even come up, but otherwise it just like it freezes a split second while it's bringing the hard drive back up the speed.
Why does it do that, and is there anyway around it?
It makes using an external drive frustrating and hurts the beautiful mac experience.
I have 4GB of memory, very fast computer otherwise, so it's not that.
Disks I put in the Superdrive, external hard drives, or anything in the USB or Firewire (thumbdrive, etc) -- nothing shows up on the desktop. All are visible in Disk Utility. USB thumbdrives and external hard drives are visible in the sidebar in Finder, but disks are not (only disk utility).
Because of this I can't burn a disk because the disk is not being recognized. In Disk Utility, the external hard drives appear mounted and can be opened in Finder, but why aren't they appearing on my desktop (they used to)?
I cannot eject a CD from my iMac. It doesn't appear on my desktop or in the finder, but I can hear it spinning sometimes.I tried to eject it with the Disk Utility and it won't. Tried turning Mac on it's side, manual eject button on keyboard, also holding down the mouse while restarting.Even tried the two credit card trick.Can't get them out!
I have just received my 3rd "You need to restart your computer" fatal message in 10 minutes, and I believe that it might have something to do with my external harddrive. I have attached the recent error log jut below:Quote:
So i decided to update my machine to 10.5.5 before I pushed this out to everyone. The main problem i've seen so far is with a failed login using a mobile account that is bound to active directory.
My machine is currently bound to AD and i have a mobile account. When I start up the machine and attempt to login with my AD account, it fails. The only time the login works is when i unplug the machine from the network and log in. Everything in directory utility shows green light that i'm still bound to AD. At the login screen, I also have a green light saying network accounts are available as well. The only accounts that work are local accounts.
Anyone else experiencing this and what have you done to cure it?
i have a HUGE collection of DVDs and i bought a portable HDD to back them up onto. So i have like 13 done and when i went to try the 14th to make sure video quality was there, there was no video quality. There was no audio and the picture looked like an itunes visualizer. I was wondering if this was a handbreak issue or because it was a newer DVD with some sort of protection on it. It was I AM LEGEND and the other movies i ripped were like John Wayne classics and movies from the 90s.
I've just received my new MacBook Pro with Retina display last week and I'm very happy with it. But there's one issue... my Thunderbolt cables keep failing!Â
I bought a Seagate GoFlex for Mac drive with the GoFlex Thunderbolt Adapter and an Apple Thunderbolt cable. The first cable failed after about an hour of operation (intensive copying of data onto the drive). I took everything to an Apple Store and they determined that the Thunderbolt cable was the culprit. They gave me a new one and I went home.Â
... just to have the same thing happen again the next day. This time the cable held up a little longer, maybe five hours until - again - the drive failed to be recognized and the new cable went bad as well!Â
I just came home from the store and this time, they swapped everything: drive, TB adapter and TB cable. I hope it won't happen again...
Have a new Mac Mini, using an external drive but I can't get it to show up in finder. It's a Lacie 1TB Porsche design HDD, using a USB connection directly into the mini. I tried it at first by connecting to an open usb on my cinema display..no good. Also no good when connected directly into the mini.
My old Mini is in the next room to the wireless DSL modem. It gets one to three max bars, usually two, and it's just through one interior wall. I don't want to spend a bunch of money, I just want to get a little better reception in the next room. I have seen USB wifi antennas advertised. Would that do anything for me? My iBook G4 in the same spot gets full reception no problem.
there's a lot of talk online about the built in power supply in Time Capsules failing - mostly the reviews on [URL] - does anyone have experience or more information about this - have apple sorted this out with the latest revisions...?
Running a 10.6.8 OS on a 2.66 intel machine. I have been using a Western Digital 1TB basic desktop external drive as my Time Machine fpr the last year. It is USB2. I have found that every few months (sometimes 2) it would not back up nor could I go back in time, there are references to Node branch or tree failures, so I end up reformating using disc utility (mac OS extended Journaled Guid) and starting a new back up luckily this hasn't happened when I really needed lost files. Interestingly this happened again a couple of days ago. Over the last week I have been doing a lot of imaging files. When it started to do a backup it seemed to take a long time to do the preparing phase (cursor clicking on Time machine icon on top bar). After searching online about the length of time it should take I decided that perhaps it was my fault, that I hadn't allowed previous backups to complete properly and I had added a lot of new files. So wait I did, after 24 hours it was still saying preparing and the count was going up very slowly. I decided to give up and start from scratch again but this time no matter what I with Disk Utility I couldn't repair or reformat it stated things like Bad parent directory hierarchy. I now had a drive I couldn't do anything with. I went to the Western Digital website and downloaded their WD Quick Formatter for Mac. This dosn't give any formatting options and only formats to OS Extended Journaled Guid (lucky for me). It worked very quickly and I started a new backup. It only took a little over 2 hours for 160gb of data which is certainly the fastest it has ever done. So fingers crossed this time, maybe there is an issue with my Disk Utlity and WD drives.
I have a 2011 macbook pro (8,1) and in january 2012 I replaced the OEM drive with a momentus XT. I can report that the drive makes a BIG difference in performance. However, the drive failed with bad sectors within a week of installation. I got a warranty replacement, and that drive also failed within a couple weeks.
I got a second warranty replacement, and that drive failed after about a month.
I am currently awaiting my third warranty replacement drive!Â
All of the failures were the same mode - bad blocks after a fairly short period of use.
I used SMART Utility to detect the problem - typically the disk itself did not flag a SMART error (so does not show up in Disk Utility) but my utility detected the problem and the SMART self tests fail. In all cases these drives were eligible for replacement via SeaTools test. These drives also caused IO errors which showed up in the system log, and the evil pinwheel cursor of impending doom.Â
So my question to the community is: if anyone out there is using these drives, have you had these problems?
If you have one of these drives I recommend using SMART Utility or other SMART monitoring software to check your drive.Â
I know seagate is not known for reliability these days, but three drive failures in a row is a little ridiculous! ... so I'm concerned that there is some bad interaction with the mac. The only other thing I can think of is bad yields related to the thailand floods - all of these drives were dated around Oct 2011.Â
I've searched around a bit but I haven't seen anyone reporting problems.
I DREAD having to restart my Mac. Because every time I get met by a Time Machine 'unable to write' fault. And you can't reformat the disc (can't unmount)Â with disc utility. (even unmounting with Terminal, and stopping indexing with Terminal, both of which fail)Â
The only way is to plug the Time Machine disc into a Windows PC and reformat with that.
OSX Lion 10.7.4 Time Machine recently started randomly failing, so I swapped out the external hard drive and failures continue. I'm wondering if its software or maybe the USB ports failing at this point.Â
Logs look like below (when it works):Â
5/22/2012 2:57:54.360 PM com.apple.backupd: Starting standard backup 5/22/2012 2:57:54.943 PM com.apple.backupd: Backing up to: /Volumes/MBBackup/Backups.backupdb 5/22/2012 2:57:58.000 PM kernel: disk2s1: device is not ready.
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Info: MacBook Pro (15-inch Early 2008), Mac OS X (10.7.3)
