[X-Unix] Phantom drive

[Ben Gold]

This raises the question that I've had for awhile... are there any 
firewire probing utilities?  If not, why not?

Unlike old SCSI drives (remember SCSI probe?), it seems like it's very 
hard to get a report on what the firewire bus is seeing vs. what the OS 
is mounting.  I've often pined for some utility that would tell me how 
many devices are seen on the firewire bus.  Is there some limitation in 
the firewire spec that makes it impossible to see a drive or device 
that's not mounting/working?

I've had some luck with DiskWarriror seeing corrupted drives, but I've 
also had drives that wouldn't mount unless I restarted or re-logged in. 
  I assume it had something to do with what has been noted below, a 
phantom diskmount directory.

-Ben

On Mar 29, 2004, at 1:12 PM, Stroller 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.
>
>> Now the directory listing for reformated external drive looks like 
>> this. `Backup' is the one I lost: `Magnolia' is the new, visible 
>> directory.
>>
>> bash2.05a phil at iMac-Server Mon Mar 29:16:45:32 / $ cd Volumes/
>> bash2.05a phil at iMac-Server Mon Mar 29:16:45:51 /Volumes $ ls -aF
>> ../        ../       Backup/   Magnolia/
>> ...
>> What is the best course of action with `Backup' ? Is it safe just to 
>> rm it?
>
> I'd certainly risk it. I'd leave the drive unplugged as I did so, but 
> I don't think this is a dangerous operation.
>
> Stroller.
>
>
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