OS X Mavericks :: How To Setup External Hard Drive To Mount At Boot (without Any Login Action)
Dec 1, 2014
First the Details:
MacBook Pro, Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013
OS X Mavericks 10.9.5
USB 3.0 External Hard drive
I am currently using an external drive for my user storage. Right now I log in with a separate User account to mount the drive, log off, and then log in with my user. I am trying to remove the extra steps so I can boot my Mac and log right in. I have not found any method that pertains specifically to Mavericks, and all of the methods I have tried for older OS versions do not seem to work properly.
Info:
MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013), OS X Mavericks (10.9.5)
After upgrading to osx 10.9.3, my external hard drive was not able to mount, but it can be mounted without issue in osx 10.6, how do I solve it? it was formatted by disk utility.
I have a 2.13GHz 13" white Macbook (Mid-2009) with a 480MB SSD, 4GB RAM and a dying SuperDrive that frankly doesn't get used very often.
I would like to yank the SuperDrive out (I use my iMac for any physical disk work anyway), install a smaller SSD (64GB) for the OS (+ obligatory recovery) in the primary position, and place the current SSD (or a HDD) in a SuperDrive enclosure to hold all personal files (documents, videos, music, etc...)
Here is the scenario I'm contemplating.
-64GB SSD: primary position, holds OSX + recovery -480GB SDD: mounted on /Users/[my user name]
As far OSX is concerned, there's only one 544GB filesystem, spread over two disks.
As an experienced Linux user, I would expect to have to modify /etc/fstab to do the trick. Mac OS X 10.9 actually has a /etc/fstab.hd that tells you that the file is useless. I am wondering whether it is possible to "mount" in the Unix sense partitions in the file system so that the system only appears to have one drive and also how.
Info: MacBook, OS X Mavericks (10.9.4), 4GB RAM, 480GB SSD
Hello everyone. I've been using an external Western Digital My Studio (500GB) drive for the last year or so with a Core2Duo Macbook Pro, and have had no problems until this morning. The drive is used primarily for Time Machine backups, but I also have some photographs stored as well.
This morning, just after I'd begun copying some of these files to another external drive, the WD drive went down, and now will not mount/showup in Finder. It DOES show up in Disk Utility, though with the Time Machine volume grayed out. I get a "could not mount" error when I click on the "mount" icon, and nothing else I try (rebooting, unplugging drive power supply, etc). has worked. I'm trying to avoid the erase-and-reformat option, because I'd lose some potentially valuable images.
Without warning my iMac [OS X Snow Leopard] popped up an alert saying that I should eject a drive before disconnecting it. I had done nothing to generate this error message. I clicked ok to close it and noticed my 4 month old, external 8T Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2 was no longer visible in my drive directory. I also noticed this external unit was making a looped grinding noise as if it was trying to write without success. I figured one of the drives failed and took it to the mac doctor. Other than a few directory errors, everything appeared to be fine, so I paid the service fee, brought it home and plugged it in only to find the same prob - obviously it's something with my iMac. Before I go spending more service fees, I wondered if anyone here could point me toward a method of discovering what might be wrong. I ran disk utility [verify and permissions] and fixed some directory errors, but don't know how to look further. iMac was home networked with a PC [Windows] and a laptop [Windows]. I did notice something wacky with the PC, but its very old and I expect it to die any day. I was running the network through the PC, so I direct connected the iMac to the router and modem but no change: still cannot see the external drives. What other info do you need to make an educated guess for me?
I have a LaCie 320 GB external hdd (USB 2.0) that worked perfectly until last night. Now it won't mount when I connect it to my computer, nor can I see it in Disk Utility. Disk Warrior can't see it either. I tried connecting it to my roommate's MBP with no luck.
It spins up just fine and doesn't make any clicking noises or anything like that, so I feel like there might just be some hope yet; I'm thinking it might just be a faulty USB cable or something, but I don't have a spare one to try it with.
Alright, so My ipod is formatted for windows when formatted in this you can only copy chunks of 4 gig things using it as an external. but if you change the formatt of it to take all sizes, then it's not compatible with mac and pc. =/ i had it originally formatted for pc because i just recently got a mac book pro and it's my primary computer. well on to the hard drive trouble that is related i'm borrowing my friends external to get a 8 gig file from my pc to my mac. it's formatted in fat32(windows and mac read) but that format only allows for a 4 gig max to be put on it at one time. so i guess i'm outta luck there, i've looked at JR split but who knows it that will work. My main q is, i'm going to be getting my own personal external soon and i want to know whats the best way to format it that it will mount on my pc and my mac and allow me to copy more that 4 gigs of stuff on it at a time.
After a lifetime of owning PC's I finally purchased a MacBook Pro running OS X. I installed Parallels Desktop 5, Windows XP, and several Windows apps to have dual functionality. Now I need to write to my NTFS ext. hard drive where I backup everything. It has 800gb of space left, so it would be a shame to get a new one just b/c I have a Mac now. I first installed MacFuse and then NTFS-3G. Now when I reboot, the ext. HD won't mount at all. What have I done wrong?
I just installed a new internal hard drive into my macbook as my old one was failing. Before doing this I backed up all of my information through Time Machine onto a Seagate FreeAgent external hard drive. I've been using this external hard drive for the past two years and I've never had any problems with my macbook mounting it. Once I had all of my personal information backed up I took out the external hard drive and then proceeded to take out my old internal hard drive and installed the new one. I installed the Mac operating system and the Macbook started up just fine but when it came time to reload all of my personal setting using Time Machine my macbook didn't recognize that there was an external drive plugged in. I know it isn't the external drive as it mounts just fine on other laptops. how I can get my macbook to mount the drive so that I can transfer all of my information onto this new internal drive?
Info: MacBook, Mac OS X (10.5.8), Seagate FreeAgent
I've been running a Toshiba 1TB external drive on my Mac Pro tower and it's been working fine. But yesterday it wouldn't mount. I could see the drive in Disc Utility, but the partition wouldn't mount. I brought it into work where I'm running an iMac and it mounted just fine. Why would it stop working on one computer (where it was previously fine) yet work okay on another? And how do I get it working on the tower?
Basically I have a 750GB hard drive in my Macbook Pro and over 300GB is taken up with 'BackUp' data. This is more than the total of everything I have on the drive other than that. Time Machine has always been setup on an external drive and when searching all files on the Macbook there is nothing for backup files so don't know where it is coming from.
I'm having difficulty with my external hard-drive, here's the info on that one:
Disk Utility won't allow me to mount the drive, I've tried using a number of softwares to read it (working under the assumption that it's an NTFS drive), including Tuxera and Paragon. I have too much stored on the hard drive to empty it back onto my old computer, and so I'm not able order to re-format it.
1. Can I setup the external hard drive to be partitioned so I can keep photos on one partition and the backup on another? How?
2. Can I hook an external hard drive up to a wireless router and have wireless backups done. It is a Linksys router and has a USB port on the back. Can I? How?
3. If I were to hook up the external hard drive to the router (if possible), can Windows and Mac both view it and access and write files on there.
I'm planning on purchasing a new MBP whenever Apple releases the upgraded models. I was also planning on purchasing a 1TB Time Capsule because 1. I need a new wireless router and 2. I wanted to be able to transfer recordings from my DirecTV DVR to the TC for later viewing. In addition to being able to use Time Machine relatively seamlessly, I liked how TC offered both the wireless router and the external hard drive in one solution. But after digging around a bit, I've found that the TCs are somewhat unreliable (overheating, 5Ghz signal issues, etc.) and it won't actually allow for transfers from the DVR. So my question is...what would I need to buy to be able to utilize Time Machine in a manner that is similar to TC allows and also be able to transfer recordings from my DVR? Or even better, is there a way to set up TC to be able to do what I'd like for it to be able to do?
A while back I bought an external hard drive for my PC, but then ditched the PC and decided to hook up the hard drive to my Mac. My External Hard Drive is a: 149.1 GB WDC WD 16 00JB-00GVA0 The problem is, I can access all the information but it will not let me do anything on the external harddrive (Like creating a file, copying and pasting a file on there, etc.) However, I can save Torrent downloads on the harddrive, but they do not show up on the actual external hard drive. But, when I press the "Find/Show directory" button in Bittorrent it does find the files. Is there something I need to do, Or is it just incompatible with my Mac?
My internal 1TB hard drive on my iMac is dead and I don't have the money to replace it at the moment. I have everything backed up on an external 1TB drive using Time Machine. As a workaround for the time being,Is there any way I can install the system on the external drive and use that as the boot drive without erasing the Time Machine Backups? It seems to me I would have to have two partitions for the external drive, one for the system, and one for Time Machine. But is there any way to add a partition without erasing the existing one with Time Machine only on it?
Today I went to plug in my Lacie 250 GB USB external hard drive into my 13 in. MacBook to get a shirt template for a design I am making. I discovered that the hard drive just would not mount and show on the desktop, and I remembered that this happened a few days before, but all I did was unplug it and plug it back in, and it worked... except that today, that didn't work at all. I tried the other USB port, and the hard drive showed up on the desktop for about a second, and then disappeared. I kept on replugging it back into both USB ports, but nothing happened.
Then I tried to see if it would work on the PC beside me, and it was recognized as an external device; however, a message came up telling me the drive was malfunctioning. I am guessing this is from ejecting it incorrectly (because I am in a hurry to head to my next classes...I use this laptop at school), but I have incorrectly disconnected it before in the past and this problem never happened to me before.
Every single project I have ever created for my design career is on that hard drive, and all I want now is to get my files back. All I need it to do is show up on the desktop for just the right amount of time for me to copy my files onto my computer.
I read online to put it into the freezer for a while and it should mount, but that didn't work. I tried using Disk Warrior, Data Rescue 3, and Tech Tool Deluxe, but the hard drive did not show up on any of those apps.I tried plugging the hard drive into an iMac as well, but it did not show up either.
Sorry if I am in the wrong forum, as you can guess im a newbie at the forum - not at computers though (6 years experience.. )
So I have a 1TB WD Hard drive USB and I copied the Leopard Disk image and restored it onto it in a 500GB partition.
I have tried to boot it up normally by holding down Alt on start up but the drive doesn't come up. Ok.
I have tried going into the Start up Disk, it comes up and when I click on it and click restart it doesn't restart, it just does that Mac Beep thing.
I have recently just tried to boot it up manually using the Open Firmware technique. It doesn't work.
I have a PPC Mac and I know that they can't normally boot up USB Drives but the other users which I read on the thread how to boot up by the Firmware technique said they're PPC and it worked.
I just wanted to format my computer, My leopard disk is gone now but I got it copied JUST IN TIME to my Hard drive.
I formatted my computer and now i'm stuck on Tiger.
I want to make a bootable clone of my iMac (PowerPC G5 running OS 10.5.8) and also backup my MacBook Pro onto an external USB hard drive so that I can restore from the external hard drive if my iMac dies (which is beginning to have startup problems).
I was planning to create 3 partitions - one for iMac's data which I'll continue to backup using TimeMachine, one for my MacBook Pro's data and one partition as a bootable clone of my iMac.
My question is.... if my iMac dies, how do I use the external hard drive to boot up from? Do I need Carbon Copy Cloner or will I be able to boot up from the external hard drive and access Apple's Disk Utility?
My imac G5 isight's hard drive is dead. I would like to install OS X on an external hard drive and just use that as the hard drive for this machine. My questions are:
Can I boot from an external hard drive via USB and just run everything off the external hard drive? If so, how should I format the external hard drive so that it can be selected and written to when I boot from the install cd? The external hard drive I would like to use is a 75 gig Acom. I've tried booting from the install cd, and it either won't even find the external hard drive, or, when it does, it says it can't write to that external hard drive.
My Macbook Pro (10.9.3) wouldn't boot up. I'd get the gray spinning progress indicator along with a gray progress bar which would get about 10% through and then restart.
I booted into recovery mode and run Disk Utility to repair the disk and got a message saying can't repair, back up your files.
So I took the HDD out and mounted it as an external drive on my Mac Mini (10.9.3). I got a message saying it's read only and I should back up my files. I can browse to my users directory and see all the base folders (Movies, Music, Docs, etc), but there's a red no entry icon on all the folders and accessing them through Finder shows they are empty.
I browsed the files through Terminal as super user and can see the files. I can also copy the files through Terminal. However, after copying a test directory some of the files are read only and others are still no access.
So the question is, how do I back up these files and maintain permissions?
I have an Intel iMac with with Snow Leopard and Windows 7 on separate partitions. Recently I have acquired an external USB hard drive. I formatted it with Ext4, and installed Linux Mint to it.
The installation went smoothly, but I can't seem to boot from the USB drive anymore. Holding down Option on start-up only gives me two choices: Mac OS X and Windows. The drive isn't recognized in either operating systems anymore: on Snow Leopard I get "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer" and on Windows, it doesn't even show up in My Computer.
I have owned a Mac Mini for three years now (my friends convinced me to try the Apple way and this is my first Mac). The CD/DVD died just three weeks after warranty expired and Apple said (in essence) 'tough crap...you didn't buy AppleCare'.I have functioned without a CD/DVD drive since then, and everything was fine... until a week or two ago. We installed an update in iTunes, and everything started running S...L...O...W... So, we rebooted the computer! Instead of rebooting, it made the "bong!" sound and then a screen with an apple and a spinning wheel runs indefinitely. We let it run all night the first time and it stays on that screen for as long as you let it.
