OS X :: Randomly Spins Up External Hard Drive?
Aug 4, 2009
So I have an external hard drive hooked up to my MBP via USB. I've noticed that every now and then (maybe every half hour or hour?) the drive spins up. It's actually really annoying, as the drive makes a loud sound as it spins up.
I can't figure out why it does this; the drive spins up and then goes back idle. Time machine is DISABLED, spotlight index on the drive is DISABLED as well. I use the drive solely for storing movies/music. There are NO applications installed on it. The only apps I have open are finder/preview/safari/firefox/adium/itunes. My guess is that some process is trying to access the drive for whatever reason now and then.
View 3 Replies
ADVERTISEMENT
Feb 25, 2009
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.
View 19 Replies
View Related
Jan 7, 2010
My friend gave me his old Apple cube G4 + 15" Cinema display in like 1000 pieces. Its completely teared apart. I tried a lot, but it doesn't work. The original IDE cable wasn't included, so I bought one for 2 cents. It should work or not? Maybe the powersupply. I'm not sure. I don't believe actually that the hardware itself, like the motherboard is broken. When everything is into place and I connect the cube to the powersupply it boots immediately. I don't have to do anything. Harddrive spins and the superdrive makes some noise as well. This repeats itself every 5 seconds. The screen is connected and gets power through DVI, but no display. Both the cube and display have touch enabled buttons to switch it on, but they do not respond (I guess).. Motherboard gives 2 light. DS1 is green, DS2 is red.
View 3 Replies
View Related
Jun 23, 2012
Why does the internal hard drive in my MacBook Pro spin up at seemingly random times? The activity monitor shows high data rates to and from the drive.
Info:MacBookPro, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
View 7 Replies
View Related
Jun 15, 2012
So my girlfriend boss wanted me to fix her computer. So I brought it home turned it on, and it didnt chime but it booted to the gray screen with apple logo/ slashed circle/and folder with a "?" So I made a USB Mac OS x bootable drive (FLASH) held down alt (try using a windows keyboard its fun) was able to select option and install a fresh copy. all seemed well was running really hot so I poped of the screen. HOLY MOLY! this thing is CAKED with dust, and I am not kidding it has literally piles of dust. So I ran updates, and did firmware updates. Turned it off for the night. Â
The next morning I went to radio shack and got Dust remove spray, opened it up made sure I was carful taking off the screen, and blew the sucker out. now its NICE and CLEAN. then i made sure I plugged everything in and turned it on. Drive spun like normal, Optical checked for a CD, and fans are also running normally. but no chime, no nothing stays as silent as normal but doesnt budge, it is like it hangs. Â
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7)
View 1 Replies
View Related
Jul 17, 2009
A while back I was running low on hard disk space so decided to upgrade my hard drive. Went ahead and upgraded to 320Gb. Then after some time, I noticed that the hard drive was making a large spinning noise so I thought it was a bad drive and RMA'd it. I just recently got the new drive and installed it and the drive was making that same loud spinning noise. Now I'm frustrated with this and want to get to the end of it. I'm thinking it might be the rubbers are out of place that holds the drive.
View 5 Replies
View Related
Sep 8, 2009
My hard drive crashed after about a year and a half. So I bought a new one and installed it myself. When I turn on my mac now and hold C with the install disk in the drive it just spins for a while below the apple and then goes to the gray please restart your computer screen.
View 4 Replies
View Related
May 1, 2010
I've noticed recently that when my imac is sleeping it's HDD spins up, crunches a bit like it does and then power down again. The screen and everything else is off, just the HDD comes on. Does anyone know what this could be? It's happened a couple of times in the last week. It's the Seagate drive BTW.
View 5 Replies
View Related
Dec 28, 2008
I have a 2008 Mac Pro with the original OSX drive and then two other hard drives, one I use for Boot Camp/Fusion and the other for my work files. Under Energy Save in system preferences, I have it so that the drives will sleep whenever possible. The issue I'm having is one of the drives, I think the one with my work files, will wake from sleep every 15 minutes or so even if I'm not accessing any of the files. I haven't timed it exactly but it's around 15-20 minutes and happens throughout the day. What is causing the drive to wake? I disabled iStat Pro because before the drives would spin every time I checked my dashboard so that's not the problem anymore.
View 16 Replies
View Related
Aug 21, 2009
I put it on Craig's list so wanted to wipe the drive and figure I'd play around with OS 9 a little just for fun. While in OS 9 it prompted me to upgrade the firmware on the DVD-ROM drive. I thought that sounded like a good idea since it makes some terrible noises when a disc is in... anyway, I did the firmware upgrade and everything went fine. That's the only real change I can think of that might have contributed to this new issue.Anyway, after that I put 10.3 on it again (I had 10.4 on it before) and it wouldn't sleep correctly. Everything looks like its going to sleep ok, then the hard drive spins up, then back down, over and over again endlessly.
View 7 Replies
View Related
Aug 24, 2009
I am enjoying my Time Capsule and have kept it in front of me for the last week to see how it behaves. I have noticed that when I attach my other external hard drive to it it will behave exactly like the Time Capsule. By this I mean that after 2 minutes of inactivity they will both spin down but when it is backup time in an hour both will start up simultaneously and my attached external hard drive will get to speed and instantly shut off again while the TC does it's thing. My questions are, can this be stopped and why is it doing this? Surely it would not spin up the external drive along with the TC as spinning it up 12 times a day isn't doing the external drive any favors...
View 2 Replies
View Related
Feb 21, 2009
Macbook Pro 17" Core 2 Duo 2.33GHz. Following a logic board replacement for a separate issue. I have two external Firewire 800 Hard drives (two separate brands and sizes) which have suddenly started unmounting randomly and giving the 'hardware removal error'. A few seconds after unmounting they mount again, only to unmount a minute later with the error again. It is now doing this in a loop.I have done the following things:
1. rebooted and checked all cable connections
2. I have tried this with the two disks plugged in separately and daisychained.
3. I have tried two separate Firewire 800 cables.
4. running the Disk Utility.
5.installing the system from scratch on a freshly formatted internal disk.
6. reinstalling again with an archive and install.
Everything seems to work fine with a Firewire 400 connection.The only software setting that I changed is to disable the "Put Hard Disks to Sleep when possible" option in the Energy Saver system prefs. Any connection? I have enabled this again and so far (a couple of hours) so good.Should I be looking at a hardware issue
View 5 Replies
View Related
Jun 12, 2010
I have had my new iMac 21.5" for about 2 weeks now. Yesterday I picked up a 500 GB LaCie USB Drive to be used for my Time Machine drive. I have the drive connected directly to a usb port on the iMac. Sometimes when the iMac goes to sleep, when I wake up the iMac I get the dreaded "This Drive Has Not Been Disconnected Properly" warning.
I have made sure that the "Put Hard Disk(s) to Sleep Whenever Possible" option is not selected under the Energy Preferences. I have tried multiple usb ports, same issue. This isn't a constant issue, it just happens sometimes. Is there anyway to tell Time Machine to mount and unmount my drive when needed?
View 2 Replies
View Related
Apr 19, 2012
I've seen several discussions on external drives randomly ejecting, but didn't see any concise resolution. I have a Western Digital Passport, P/N WD320ME-01 2209A, using the OEM USB (2.0 I think) cable (~12 inches long). My ~4 year old mac book is running OSX 10.7.3. I use this drive for Time Machine B/U. Seemed to work ok (no ejects) when Leopard was the OS, but, after going to Snow Leopard, and now Lion, I get 'disk improperly ejected' errors when trying to run TM, or ever Repair under Disk Utilities. I did get one good TM back up, under Lion, after reformating the drive [extended (journaled)], but the next time I tried to run TM I started getting the 'improperly ejected' errors. Don't know if there is an issue with Lion (and earlier SL), or with WD drives. The fact that it originally worked leads
View 1 Replies
View Related
May 26, 2012
I have a mid 2010 MacBook Pro that has been shutting down randomly for quite a while now. It seems to happen most when I have more than one application running but sometimes happens with nothing running at all. It seems that the screen goes off and the sound skips but the keyboard light is still on. I thought it was because I had a bad hard drive but I replaced it and it still randomly shuts down. I ran smart utility and it all passed. I just don't understand what can be causing this? I take this computer to school all the time and it's kind of embarrassing having this shut down on me mid-presentation.
Info:
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.4)
View 1 Replies
View Related
Aug 24, 2014
I have a external SATA drive that was used on my old Windows laptop. The interface for the drive is USB 3.0. Whenever i try to view my files on the drive, the drive randomly disconnects, and notifications pop up saying that the drive was not ejected properly.
Also the drive has been reformatted to a Mac format, but it still continues to do this.
Info:
MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Mavericks (10.9.4)
View 1 Replies
View Related
Mar 5, 2009
I have two user accounts. On my one account (the main one) Safari works fine but on the other account just today it started loading real slow. then once it finally pops up with the home apple screen and you click anything, the wheel spins and spins for like 3 min then safari quits unexpectedly. When i click to report to apple and then send it, again the wheel spins for a long time and then it says it was unable to send to apple please check internet connection and try again. But, there is nothing wrong with my internet connection because if i switch to my other account internet works just fine!
View 1 Replies
View Related
Jun 1, 2009
Have had my imac for about a year and just recently my hard drive changed from "c:" to "+++++". I changed it to read "hard drive" and then a few days later it changed again to "5+". Why is it doing this?
View 4 Replies
View Related
Nov 12, 2009
if i delete files off my internal hard drive (Macintosh HD), will it still be on my external hard drive or will it just add to it?
View 1 Replies
View Related
Oct 14, 2009
with cloning/copying the content one an external hard drive onto a new external hard drive. Basically, I have a 500GB FW400 drive which I use to store my media files. It's full, so I purchased a 1TB FW800 drive to replace it. Obviously, I thought I could simply copy and paste the media files from the old drive to the new one.I cannot copy the media files to my internal drive first as my internal drive is only 250GB and nearly full itself.I have used Disk Utility to attempt to close the old drive to the new drive, but keep getting "insufficient space" errors.
View 9 Replies
View Related
Mar 31, 2012
Recently I bought 2 identical WD Scorpio Blue 1TB hard drives for my macbook pro 13 inch 2010. My aim is to replace the internal hard drive with one of the two I just purchased and use it as my system drive with Lion, Windows and Data partitions. And for the other hard drive I want to use it as a full disk back up for the internal drive (now 1TB hard drive). After I was done with setting up both windows and mac and data transfer, when I booedt into the recovery partition from the internal drive to clone the drive to the external drive, the disk utility gave me this error (Could not validate source - error 254). I also tried using Carbon Copy Cloner but it only could clone partitions, not the entire drive. Yesterday I downloaded a copy of Clonezilla. It worked fine until it had to clone an exFAT partition (my data partition). The exFAT partition appeared as 'RAW' partition in clonezilla. As a result, the whole partition appeared to be full and clonezilla had to copy every single blocks of data in that partition and the estimated time remaining was about 30 hours. So clonezilla is out too. Just want to ask if there is any program/application (bootable or not) which allows can do a full disk clone to an external hard drive.
View 1 Replies
View Related
Mar 19, 2009
Unlike the other external HDD that I built years ago, the LaCie drive does not spin down even when it is not being accessed. This is annoying because my iMac runs silently but the LaCie drive is quite loud with the HDD spinning.
Is this normal for an external HDD? How can I make it spin down when it's not being used?
Having said above, the LaCie drive does spin down when I put the iMac to sleep.
View 9 Replies
View Related
Mar 1, 2012
I've had a lot of problems with my iMac G5 power supply and since I have newer computers I've decided to get rid of this computer.Â
I want to save the hard drive and put it in a case, then use it as an external drive on my other Macs.Â
What sort of case do I need to shop for? Should I look for SATA or what exactly is the proper nomenclature.Â
Is USB 2 the preferred choice, or Firewire, or what? Is there a USB 3? I use a mid-2010 27 inch iMac with the intel processor, and I needed to buy an adapter to use my older Firewire external drive. Is Firewire a dodo?Â
View 3 Replies
View Related
Apr 12, 2012
I need to back up hard drive to an external hard drive. How can I do this automactically?Â
Powermac g5
10.4.11
tiger
Info:
Mac OS X (10.4.11)
View 1 Replies
View Related
Aug 9, 2006
i have a power mac g-5 quad with an external dvd drive and a external hard drive and 2gb of ram. on my ext. hard drive i downloaded mac the ripper and that is where i put all my dvds, now today on my pmac i was using mac the ripper, popcorn, itunes, safari all at once and it froze up on me?why? could the ram be an issue? how may programs can i use at once with my pmac?
View 3 Replies
View Related
Nov 14, 2010
I have a 2009 MacPro with an OS/apps main drive, and internal Data drive, and Firewire external backup drive. Time Machine points to the backup drive (partitioned for main and data), and SuperDuper clone/copies to it at night. At occasional and upredictable times, while I'm working, the backup drive spins up. The Mac Pro waits. The TimeMachine icon is not turning. Not sure why this happens, but its very frustrating since I have to stop and wait for the Apple 'pinwheel' to stop before I can continue what I was doing, or typing.
View 7 Replies
View Related
Jul 12, 2010
Looking for opinions or comparisons on performance between an internal mac hard drive vs an external firewire 800 hard drive or better. Is the performance on an internal MP drive or iMac internal drive much faster than connecting to a firewire 800 drive? I'm sure it depends on the drive, I'm wondering about apple factory installed internal drive vs say a WD external firewire 800
View 12 Replies
View Related
Sep 6, 2009
I just tried to play a legit DVD and it won't play. It accepts the DVD, spins for a bit then spits it back out. I've tried several ones. All legitimate dvd's (not burnt ones) and none of them work. I've played DVD's on here before.
View 2 Replies
View Related
Dec 21, 2009
Here is what is going on with my MacBook:
-If I insert a music CD, the CD drive spins it and makes noise. It does not open iTunes or even show it on the desktop. It is not recognized. Then the computer ejects the disc.
-My iDVD software seems to have taken a crap. I am prompted every time the computer boots up that iDVD has quit unexpectedly and gives the options of "relaunch" "cancel" or "report to Apple".
-This is the weird part: I was going to reinstall Leopard OSX from the disc. The computer reads the discs and the "X" screen pops up. I then try to go through to reinstall the software as it tells me that it will restart.
It restarts and then ejects the disc when the Apple logo pops up. Therefore I cannot reinstall the software. Does this sound like a software or hardware problem? Can the fact that iDVD is not working mean that my CD's would not play? Does anyone have any ideas on what I can do here? I am desperate and would like to know what other approach I should take before I put a new drive in.
White MacBook, 2yrs old. 500gbhd, 4g RAM.
View 10 Replies
View Related
Aug 19, 2007
In other words... I have moved my music library to the external hard drive, as per an earlier thread I read here on the forums. It worked like quite well. Now that it is working perfectly, I am having a hard time leaving well enough alone. It is never a good idea for me to think too much...Can itunes be installed and run on/from an external hard drive? If so, how?
View 15 Replies
View Related
