A neighbor needed to borrow a FW cable, so I unmounted my FW external drive, turned the drive off, and disconnected the cable.

An hour later, I returned the cable to the external drive and turned it on. The drive spins up, but none of the previously working volumes mount.

DiskUtilities and DiskWarrior do not see the drives or volumes.

I have shut down, SafeBooted, Zapped, connected and reconnected the cable several times, but to no joy.

Any suggestions? Please help if you can. Indeed I am frustrated

Your neighbor isn't a PC user, by any chance?

No. As a matter of fact, when I got to his house, it turned out he did not even need the cable, so it was returned as it was.

Why would that have been an issue?

Sounds to me like that cable is suspect after the removal/re-install.....got another you can test with?

I connected the (failed) dive to my wife's machine via her cables, and sadly, as before, the dive spins up, but the volumes do not mount.

Arrgh!

Any luck with mounting them via DiskUtility or in the Terminal via the command:

diskutil mountDisk /dev/disk1

Disk Utility does not see the missing volumes, so no joy there.

When I run the Terminal command I get: "Unable to find disk for /dev/disk1"

Indeed I am confused…

I'm wondering if the neighbor might have accidentally done something to erase the volumes. The most plausible scenario that might cause that to happen is plugging the disk into a Windows machine, seeing the "This disk needs to be initialized for use with Windows, do you want to initialize it?" dialog and hitting yes.

I suspected that you may have misread, and you did... Harv only loaned out his FW cable, not his HD.

As it were, the cable that I took to my neighbor's home was not used.

FWIW, I was careful to carry the cable in a clean bag so the pins don't corrupt (my common practice).

I have also tried restarting from a cold boot. Again, no joy.

I've often wondered about the possibility of cable pins, not to mention infrequently/unused ports, corroding; have you got experience in that regard or are you just being prudent?

I hope you're not experiencing one of V1's classic "there's always a moment in time before which it worked and after which it didn't" moments, and I hope the data on your HD is not irreplaceable. (I haven't got any reason to think that it will behave differently than DU and DW, but have you got TechTool Pro?)

Artie,

I do have TTP. Is there a feature therein that can at least see the drives? I did not find such. But looking in the wrong place is not unknown to moi…

FWIW, the data on the external BU is not critical. My main HD is partitioned in 4 volumes, so I have 3 internal backups.

TTP sees the volumes on my external HD under Test Selection > Volume Structures and File Structures.

I'm happy to hear that you're not at risk of losing any critical data.

Artie,

Alas, TTP only sees the internal volumes. The ones on my external BU remain hidden (or unmounted).

It could be the drive just failed. I'll open the enclosure later today, call the drive mfgr., and see what's what re the warranty.

Maybe the enclosure has failed, not the drive; have you got another enclosure to swap it out?

I do not have another enclosure for testing, but prior to calling the HD mfgr., I'll re-seat all connections--just in case…

Right you are. Totally missed that.

Sound like a case of coincidental timing to me.

Updated Status:

I just got off the phone with a Seagate tech. My warranty expired in September, but as the tech thinks the HD needs replacing, that is in processing. What, if any, handling charges are involved will be known tomorrow (when their servers are expected be back up). It is then that I'll also know the RMA drill, shipping time, etc.

And of course, thanks to all for your patience and hand-holding.

could be a bad cable, power adapter, controller board in the case, or hard drive.

At the very least, take out the drive and attach it to another bridge or controller. Only around 40% of external failures I see are actual dead drives.

All that is what I'm afraid of. My new (replacement) drive should be here the later part of next week, so one way or another, I hope to put an end to this saga.

A (free, albeit a factory refurb.) replacement drive arrived yesterday. And V1 wins the prize! The new drive likewise fails to mount.

I used my cable with a different device and it worked fine, so I presume the fault lies with the enclosure. I'll give Macally a call later today.

The saga continues…

I spoke with the Macally folks today. In short: The enclosure has a 1 year warranty, ergo, I'm outta luck. They are willing to send me a new "bridge", which is (apparently) easy to install, and likely to fix the problem, but what they really said was that I can buy a new enclosure (on Amazon) for just a few Zorkmids more than I would pay for the bridge & save all the hassle in the process. Seems like sound advice to me.

Gads, education is expensive…

I lay claim to the fair damsel!

Point well taken, kind sir. But the fair damsel ain't quite so fair any more, what with the orientation, training, management, and the like, well, she might be a bit shop-worn…