[X-Unix] Re: HD Mounting Trouble

[Peter Dyballa]

Working with Mac OS 9 I had these minutes of file system check too a 
few times, usually when I had to reboot because an application was 
running wild or the Mac became not functioning. Mac OS 9 leaves some 
info on the disk that on next mount operation things have to be cleaned 
up.

Presuming that something similiar happens in Mac OS X too I'd recommend 
to eject the USB disk's volumes before rebooting. Maybe the many USB 
devices are not arbitrated correctly so that the Mac OS X file system 
caches are not always completely written to disk. What I can observe 
with my external FireWire disk is that some ten seconds have to pass 
until the first of its volumes gets ejected.

One things might bring a cure: activate journaling. It won't work with 
Mac OS 9, which has no idea of journaling, so the volumes would be like 
normal HFS+ volumes. Only in Mac OS X every change of a file or any of 
its attributes would be journalled and could be re-played in case some 
failure happened. Rebooting for example. And the re-play of a journal 
is much faster than the usual repair that happens otherwise.

--
Greetings

   Pete

"Computers are good at following instructions,
but not at reading your mind."
D. E. Knuth, The TeXbook, Addison-Wesley 1984, 1986, 1996, p. 9