I have a USB external hard drive that is formatted as HFS-Plus using a GUID Partition Table. Up until very recently it was working fine and when plugged in to my Macbook showed up on the desktop, etc. For some reason now it no longer shows up on the desktop. My friend who does not do much technical is the main user of it. Here is what I know so far:
In Disk Utility only the hard drive shows up, the partition does not. It cannot be ejected. The log shows nothing very useful but here it is anyway just in case (this is the log for plugging it in and then attempting to eject from Disk Utility):
2011-03-27 08:32:54 -0400: Name : Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Media Type : Disk Partition Map Scheme : GUID Partition Table Disk Identifier : disk1 Media Name : Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Media Media Type : Generic Connection Bus : USB USB Serial Number : NA01JB1V Device Tree : /PCI0@0/EHC2@6,1/@2:0 Writable : Yes Ejectable : Yes Mac OS 9 Drivers Installed : No Location : External Total Capacity : 465.8 GB (500,107,861,504 Bytes) S.M.A.R.T. Status : Not Supported Disk Number : 1 Partition Number : 0 2011-03-27 08:32:54 -0400: 2011-03-27 08:33:32 -0400: Eject of “Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Media” failedHere is a screenshot from the disk utility for the partition tab for the disk. As you can see it does not show the partition on the side bar or in the partition tab.
When I plug the drive into my ubuntu server it recognizes it fine. It is mountable and both readable and writable. All partitions check out fine (with fsck.* (there is a FAT32 EFI System Partition at the front)). As far as I can tell there is nothing wrong with the disk. Here is the output of parted -l for this disk:
Model: Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex (scsi) Disk /dev/sdc: 500GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: gpt Number Start End Size File system Name Flags 1 20.5kB 210MB 210MB fat32 EFI System Partition boot 2 210MB 500GB 500GB hfsx Untitled
What are some explanations and/or fixes for this behavior? What came to mind is that something might be wrong with the partition table but as far as I can tell there are no tools to verify this and parted did not throw any errors so I feel like that makes this theory dubious. It might be that there is something quirky with it that linux is fine with but Mac OS X isn't.
I would rather not format the drive because I feel like that would be admitting defeat. (and even then there isn't a guarantee that it will start working again).
