[X-Unix] Phantom drive

[Phil Dobbin]

On Mon, 29 Mar 2004 19:12:33 +0100, Stroller <MacMonster at myrealbox.com> wrote:

>On Mar 29, 2004, at 5:28 pm, Phil Dobbin wrote:
>
>> Last night I had a power cut and when the power was restored, the 
>> external LaCie FW drive I use for backups wouldn't mount. Console 
>> spewed a lot of this:
>>
>> Mar 29 00:58:52 iMac-Server /sbin/autodiskmount[213]: disk1s2    hfs   
>>    yes   yes   Backup           [not mounted]
>>
>> Mar 29 00:58:52 iMac-Server /sbin/autodiskmount[213]: mountDisks: 
>> mkdir(/Volumes/Backup) failed, File exists
>>
>> Apple System Profiler could see the drive and Disk Utility could see 
>> it and verify it and gave it a clean bill of health but it seemed the 
>> data on the drive had been lost/corrupted. Based on this assumption I 
>> went ahead and did the reformat.
>
>I don't think you needed to format it.
>I think from this logfile that when a removable drive is added 
>/sbin/autodiskmount detects it, reads the volumename of it and creates 
>a corresponding directory in /Volumes. When the drive is unmounted the 
>system removes the subdirectory of /Volume.
>
>I think that when your system crashed /Volumes/Backup was not removed, 
>so when you plugged the drive in again /sbin/autodiskmount was not able 
>to create that directory (because it already existed), This caused 
>autodiskmount to exit instead of mounting the volume.
>
>I think that if you'd unplugged the firewire drive and typed `sudo rm 
>-rf /Volumes/Backup` all would have been well when you plugged the 
>drive in again.

Thanks for that. From reading that it does make sense. Wish I'd've asked here first. Live and learn...

Regards,

    Phil.