Don Wakefield wrote on Monday, 11th of October 2010: > I have Tiger on my internal drive and Leopard on a Verbatim external > firewire drive. I have been feeling my way through Leopard for the past > month or so and now have gotten into trouble. I have suffered a series of > events which may or may not be related but in total they have exhausted my > repair capabilities. I ask the group for further suggestions. > > Yesterday, Time Machine reported failure to back up my system (to a third > external drive) because it thought the disk had been removed. It had not, > and was clearly visible both on the desktop. I restarted Time Machine and > thought I was done. > > Today, on startup, my EMac took a bit longer to arise, flashed a folder in > the center of the screen, and promptly awoke in Tiger. The Leopard disk > was at that time visible on the desktop and showed no difficulty when I > browsed it. > > Thinking the Mac just the correct startup info, I went to preferences and > directed the next startup to be the disk with Leopard. Unfortunately, > after restart it awoke in Tiger again. > > This time thinking there was a problem with the Leopard drive, I ran disk > repair and it reported that it had repaired the disk. I then selected the > Leopard hard drive as the startup and restarted. > > Since then not only does the Mac wake up in Tiger, but the the Verbatim > disk is not even visible on the desktop. Restarts, drive utility, plugging > and unplugging cables, I can't seem to coax it to the desktop. If this > were OS9, I would take SCSI Probe and force the drive to mount but I don't > know a similar trick in OSX, > > Additional suggestions are welcomed. I have difficulty believing that drive > utility could render the Verbatim invisible. > > Your suggestions are welcomed. > > Don Wakefield
Have you considered the slight possibility that your firewire ports are being unreliable, or that the firefire support –however that is realized, like being an extra controller chip on the computers mainboard– is braking down? That is what comes to my mind when I hear that the external drives aren't even shown on the desktop. What else can you try? When switching on your Mac hold the Option key down after the gong until you'll hopefully see a boot selection screen. If you don't see the external drives, remove them again, and connect only the one with Leopard on it. Click the reload button on this very boot selection screen and hopefully it will show up then. Keep timeouts in mind. Try reloading once more. Try reconnecting, try reloading. Try and try. If it should not show up on this boot selection screen, then there are two possibilities: 1) the external disk is not recognized by Open Firmware 2) no compatible bootable OS is found in it (but external disk is recognized) If you are sure about 2), then you can be fairly sure that either the external disk is broken or the interface for that external disk – firewire in your case. If another external disk works alright, then it should be only the disk. Note that it can also be a loose plug, you should then push and hold it with the application of a little strengh to ensure that all the contacts maintain the connection. I hope this will help to diagnose the problem. One more, a bit more radical idea comes to my mind. If the external firewire drive is a regular IDE drive inside the firewire external enclosure, I'd remove it from the external enclosure, and then replace it with the interal (Tiger) drive. This way you should at least see if Leopard starts up alright. Now, if that worked, somethings definitely wrong with that firewire interface inf your Mac. Cheers, Andreas aka Mac User #330250 -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
