OS X :: Disk Heartbeat While USB Drive / Card Mounted
Jun 29, 2009
I just noticed this strange thing a couple of weeks ago and just found the cause. Note I'm running a Mac Pro w/4 drives, 1 of which is dedicated Time Machine drive. Usually the system is dead quiet (disk activity as well) except when I am actually doing something or time machine is backing up. I have also noted what spotlight 'sounds' like when it's doing a background index. This 'heartbeat' is a click, click, thump, thump (I just used those terms to describe two distinct sounds, referring to disk access/seeking). It will do this forever every 2-3 seconds. I have closed everything, looked at activity monitor, quit things that I thought might be causing it with no help. Note with the 'thump' there is an ever so slight increase in 1 of the cpu monitors.
Anyway, tonight I just decided to dig more in to it. Because I have 4 drives I decided to at least dis-mount 3 of them to try to determine which drive was actually getting accessed. That's when I noticed I had a cf flash card mounted in my card reader. I dismounted that 1st and, well, the drive access stopped! I re-inserted it and it started up again. I inserted a different (SD instead of CF) card and it also started again. I've never noticed this before. What would be monitoring a mounted flash card? Further investigation revealed that it also does it with USB 'thumb' drives and USB 'hard' drives. BTW, I'm on 10.5.7 if that matters. Now that I know WHAT is wearing out my drive seek mechanism, I can stop it by ejecting any removable media!
In order that my tele provider remotly can take control over my computer they send me a program (_yousee QS8c.dmg ) via internet.When I open it I get the message that the program fails to open. I can get the attached information which automatic will be sent to Apple.I never gat any answers and I far from being a superuser so I am lost.
Recently I haven't been able to backup. Why this is? Not too sure. I don't remember changing any settings or anything recently but within the last 2 weeks or so I haven't been able to backup at all. When I start backing up it says "preparing backup" then an error message pops up that says "The backup disk image could not be mounted".
I just got a new harddisk and have been trying to get it functioning properly today, the problem is the following: Drive is partitioned in HFS+ using macdrive7 (installed on my system). It does show up in windows very easily thanks to the airport utility, however, it shows the file system as being fat32. I formatted the disk in HFS+ on purpose to be able to storage large files in the network drive, so this is a problem. Also, the disks show empty, although i already put some files on the disk for testing purposes, this was done when the drive was connected directly via usb. Does anyone know how I can get windows to show the drives as HFS+?
My files were backing up for about a day, had 75gb of 100gb done and then my power went out. It cancelled out, and then when it came back on I tried to resume it. It started to backup 25gb, which I'm assuming is just the last 25gb that it had to do. Anyway, it did that for a while then stopped, and now when I try to backup, it says: "Time Machine Error: The backup disk image could not be mounted."
How do I backup the rest of my stuff? Do I have to start over? And is there a way to make it transfer faster? I mean, there's no way to directly connect it to your computer, is there? Also, in the Time Machine settings thing, it says "Available: 839.8GB of 929.5GB. Does that mean it has 839gb of my 929gb backed up? What happened to the other 71gb? I just want my stuff to be backed up, why is this so complicated?
For sharing my iPhoto Library among multiple users on a MacBook Pro running, currently 10.6.8, I have by a Apple Support guide created a disk image file, and mounted it for storing my pictures without permission issues.However, to account for future expansion, the disk image is made to be 100 GB, while current photo library size is approx 50 GB. Is there any way of getting Time Machine to backup the files within the mounted disk, rather than backing up the disk image file itself? So that the size of the backup at present would be the actual size of contents of the disk, rather than the whole disk image file itself? And furthermore, by copying a disk image file, will the actual files within also be backuped?
I have Seagate FreeAgent Go 250 GB USB Harddrive. I don't know why but I cannot access my drive. When i plug usb cable, nothing appears on desktop. Only Disk utility can see Drive. but it seems in grey font. when i click mount, it gives error that says repair disk. But when i start repair disk, nothing is happening. Progress bar is not moving. Just preparing bar like this
I have an external drive mounted via firewire and formatted with HFS.
I would like this drive to be accessible by an administrator, say admin, only and have used Finder to set permissions. So the user and group for the /Volume/<drive> is admin:admin.
I have created a standard user, say user. However I find that when the standard user logs in he can access the volume and the rights for the drive become user:user instead of admin:admin, so that drive is accessible by any login user no matter what permissions I set as an administrator.
Is there any way to make a shortcut to the desktop of a mounted network drive? like when you map a drive in windows XP but its in "My computer" instead of the desktop?
I got this big hard drive and attached it to my Airport Extreme. I can get to it just fine, however, I would ideally like to make it so this drive is ALWAYS mounted on my computer. I've got my iTunes and iPhoto libraries on here, and it seems like every time I wake my computer or reboot, I need to reconnect to the drive, otherwise iTunes/iPhoto freak out because they can't find it. Is there a way I can tell my Mac to stay connected to the drive, and automatically look for it if it's not mounted?
I have a Macbook (blackbook) running OS X 10.5.3 and a 160GB Firelite HD that connects via USB. It use to show up and run just find but lately it hasn't been showing up on the desktop or in Finder. However, it shows up in Disk Utility, which shows that nothing is wrong with it. How do I get it to show back up on the desktop/finder?
I use my time capsule to store some shared files on my home network. When I access these file from the time capsule a mounted drive (share? I don�t know what it�s called) appears on my desktop. This has been working great. The problem is, if more then one user is logged in to the computer only the first user who accessed the mounted drive called �Data� can access it, the others get permission denied.
I set up a 32g partition for windows xp pro. Loaded the disk and formated the partition to FAT. Hold option at startup and load windows. Upon loading windows i get the following message "There is no disk in the drive. Please insert a disk into drive." I have tried leaving the xp disk in, I have tried taking it out before loading windows and putting it in afterwords, nothing works. I can not eject disk while in windows.
I recently stopped at the store to see what the problem was with my disk drive and i was told that my disk drive is failing i bought my white macbook in 11/2008 and didnt purchase the extended warranty badtimes but the guy from said it would cost $250 for a new disk drive. Is it possible to buy the disk drive from somewhere else and install it my self??? Im just curious if its cheaper to do it myself or have apple do it
I bought an Express card from here: [URL] I connected an eSATA drive to it. I don't see the drive in Finder and I suspect I need to format it first. But I don't see an equivalent to the Windows Disk Manager. How do I format the new external drive?
I am considering purchasing diskwarrior but want to make sure it can help my situation before I purchase it. My imac will not boot from the internal hard drive (Intel processor) When I use disk utility to try and repair the disk, I get error messages and it won't repair. I can see the HD but cannot repair it. When I connect using target mode with my mac book pro, the hard drive does not appear on my host (macbook pro) computer. I have reloaded OS X (Leopard) onto a firewire external drive and can boot my imac that way but I can not find my original internal Macintosh HD. Will disk warrior be able to help with this scenario. I would really like to access that internal Macintosh HD and retrieve my files.
I have read most things to do with the grey screen and the screen with the question mark, and it's obvious I have to put some sort of disks in, but there is already a disk stuck in the drive?
I have a 2TB Western Digital My Book Studio FW800 external that has 5 partitions, connected to my 2011 iMac. I had help doing the partitions and don't really remember the reasoning, but one is just for my SuperDuper! backup, one is Miscellaneous, one for movie clips off my camcorder, one for misc scanned photo's and one for my genealogy research. I back up using Time Machine to a Time Capsule and also to this WD hard drive with SuperDuper!
Recently I'm getting a pop up message that "Mac OS X can't repair the disk "Genealogy"'. And it needs to be reformatted. It's become a read only disk. When I look in Disk Utility it shows all the partitions as "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" EXCEPT for the one in question. I also noticed that there are a lot of files with "date created" being the same date in 1969! These files may be letters I've written or photo's I added to that partition within the last few years.
I think I have to completely reformat the entire external hard drive to repair this, but I want to make sure. Because it's going to be a major hassle backing it all up to another external (having to get one first) and then figuring out how to make the files that have turned "read only" in that one partition, back to their original state! Does this sound right, that I have to reformat the entire external hard drive? And how do I get the read-only files back to their original state.
I have a Seagate 1 TB Backup Plus Drive which was working perfectly fine until I plugged it into a USB hub. It detected it while in the hub and I was able to get files off of it, but when I ejected it from the hub and put it back into the USB slot on the computer it was not detected by finder. It shows up in the disk utility and I clicked verify and repair and it says:
Verify and Repair volume “Seagate Backup Plus Drive” Checking file system Volume repair complete. Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.
Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.
Is there any way to get this to work properly again? Or if not is there a way for me to recover my files on the external hard drive?
I have a Macbook PRO late 2011 running OS X Mavericks.
I have an old Macbook via 2007 and I'm trying to update my operating system (currently OS 10.5.8) to Snow Leopard, but the disk is not reading in the disk drive. And unfortunately, Snow Leopard is only on a DVD, it can't be downloaded.I figure I have 2 choices:
1) take it in and spend $49 to have them do diagnostics and then tell me they probably need to replace the superdrive
2) I could buy an external optical drive. But I would need to know which one would be compatable with my old *** Macbook.
I have a mid-2009 13" MBP (2.26, 4 gigs, 1TB HDD, SL 10.6.4) and the SD card reader is not recognizing any of my SD cards (won't mount and also not seen in Disk Utility). The cards are recognized when using a USB adaptor, and also work fine in my wife's MBP SD card reader, so I know it's not the cards. System Profiler recognizes the internal card reader on my system.
I've tried resetting the SMC and reformatting the cards but nothing has worked so far.
EDIT: The SD card reader isn't working under OSX or in Windows, btw.
I ran installer then went to disk utility and pushed disk repair. it ran and indicated in green that no repairs were necessary. i then went to startup disk and only the Diks and network startup showed up but no hard drive. i also open computer to make sure was not wet muddy due to leak in cooling system but all was dry
I have an eSATA drive that was formatted on Windows using Bootcamp. It is connected via an Express Card. I want to now format it for OSX. But when I boot to OSX I don't even see the drive. Is there something I have to do to enable the Express Card?
The internal card reader on my MacBook Pro 13" (5/2011) worked just fine until a few weeks ago.Today however it left me in the cold.The SD card that I normally use does not show up anywhere, not even in Disk Utility. Other SD cards don't show up neither. There was no pbm accessing the data using an old Windows PC.A user friendly Sofware Function Test of the Internal Card Reader could give a quick answer where to look for error.
Recently I've had this problem where-by i can't right-click on a mounted disk and select eject from the contextual menu. When I attempt to right-click, the Finder 'refreshes' itself and I don't get a contextual menu at-all.
First, safari froze (spinning beach ball). I only had 2 tabs open (cnn and facebook) and Mail. Not much going on, it has never froze like that so I let it sit for about 10 minutes. It was still spinning when I came back so I did a hard shut down (held power button). I tried to turn it back on about a minute later but it wouldn't go past the grey screen...and then the lovely folder/question mark came up. Joy oh joy.
So I booted from the install disk and it said my hdd was not mounted. I ran disk utility and it gave me these errors:
-Invalid node structure -Volume needs to be repaired -Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit
