[1394] FW mounting problem after improper put-away 10.1/10-.2

[Arne Halbakken]

Have you tried booting it up in OS 9 to see if it would recognize the drive?

Have you tried the Firewire drive on a friend's computer? Have you 
tried booting up on the install CD? (I don't know if the driver is 
loaded on the CD or not.)

Have you considered that it might be a corrupted plist (preference 
file)? If that is the case, you might consider trashing the offending 
file. Could it be a plist relating to the Apple Disk Utility or a 
Firewire driver?

Disk Warrior (by Alsoft) is the best utility for repairing directory problems.

Have you tried re-installing the Apple Disk Utility?

If you do end up re-formatting the Firewire drive, you might consider 
HFS+ (Apple extended) since it utilizes space better than HFS 
(standard). Sorry, I just saw that in your e-mail that that is what 
you are planning on doing. It would be nice to recover your data 
first.

You might want to check for some ideas on Randy Singer's excellent 
site. <http://www.macattorney.com/tutorial.html>

Good luck. I hope you get some good ideas to try.

Arne Halbakken

>My OS 10.1 system got locked up and I had to do the evil unplug of 
>the machine to get it back.
>
>The system is up and working great, but now I can't mount my Firewire drive.
>I couldn't "eject" it properly before (similar to a power outage) 
>but need get it to mount now.
>
>I looked at Disk Utility on 10.1 and saw a B-tree error, that would 
>come and go, if I repeatedly clicked "repair"
>I checked out the disk on a 10.2 system and was able to repair the 
>B-tree error but still couldn't mount the disk.
>It was "standard" formatted.
>
>OK ... so for this, I've given up on recovering the data and am 
>trying to reformat the disk (on 10.2) to extended format.
>Now it seems the Apple Disk Utility is stuck in the "Preparing drive 
>... unmounting old volumes" phase.  The blue bar is still animated 
>"flowing" , but seems to be stuck 3/4 the way though the process.
>
>Checked the processes using the "top" command in the Terminal.  Disk 
>Utility is not locked up, as I see fluctuations in its usage of the 
>CPU.  Still... nothing has happened for a several minutes.
>
>GOAL:  I'm laying down lots of DV video to the drive to edit later. 
>I need to have the drive be a reliable archive and not need to be 
>reformatted or lose data in case it gets unmounted improperly.