[X-Unix] HD Mounting Trouble

[Dave Higgins]

I'm having trouble with one particular HD not mounting properly. 
Although this is not necessarily a UNIX problem, I'm hoping maybe there 
will be a UNIX solution.

What happens is this: An external (USB) HD will not re-mount when 
rebooting into OS X. If I reboot into OS 9, it will mount. If it has 
failed to mount in OS X when I move to OS 9, I have to wait for the 
drive to run through a repair cycle (I presume that's what it is). 
After a few minutes the HD will mount on OS 9. When I reboot into OS X, 
it will mount at this point. But, if I have to reboot OS X for any 
reason (be it my choice or forced to by lockup or installer), the drive 
won't mount until going back into 9 again then back to X.

When in OS X, but unable to mount, the drive does show up in Disk 
Utility. The volume name, however, is greyed out. If I select it and 
hit the "Mount" button, nothing happens. If I eject it there, then 
unplug and re-plug in the USB cable, it will go back to the same 
thing... USB drive unit shows, but volume doesn't mount. Disk Utility 
will let me run a test/repair on it, and shows no problem.

I've also thrown all the tests that Tech Tool Pro and Norton Disk 
Doctor have at it, but all tests show no errors. Usually, when doing 
this, of course, it has to un-mount the drive and it don't come back 
until doing the double reboot dance again.

It's not the fault of the USB case. I swap it out with another USB case 
I have (different brand) and the problem swaps with the drive.

I've tried studying the "mount" man page, along with the associated 
files, but can't seem to come up with a proper solution, although I'm 
still not that savvy when it comes to this type of UNIX works. I've 
recorded what running just plain "mount" in Terminal gives me both with 
the drive mounted and without it mounted. The missing line when not 
mounted is:

/dev/disk0s10 on /Volumes/Bonehead (local, nodev, nosuid, journaled)

Anyone seen anything like this? Any suggestions? I'm hoping that 
"mount" might do the trick with the right command string, but I just 
don't know the right syntax to get it to work. Until I'm able to copy 
it all over to another drive (it's a WD 250G that's pretty full) and 
reformat it, I'd be willing to run a shell one-liner to mount it after 
reboots (I basically leave it running all the time anyway, so...).

Thanks for any help and ideas.

Dave.