Firewire drive won't mount on Xserve, but mounts on G5

[Foamcow]

Hi,

I've been off work for a week and come back in today to find they've been having a problem while I was away.

We have an Xserve with a tape drive on it for backup and a number of external LaCie 250Gb drives that contain data and copies of data.

While I was away the tape drive seems to have failed (it no longer will see the tapes when Retrospect runs - but it will see them when checking scripts).

One of the external Lacie drives will no longer mount when attached to the Xserve (via firewire) but it will mount when attached to one of our G5 workstations.

The tape drive is by the by - I feel the 2 problems are probably related - but my main priority is getting this external drive mounting on the Xserve once more.

I've checked the Volumes directory on the Xserve and there is no residual record of the drive in there (I've seen this on another Xserve, where the drive wasn't removed from Volumes when it was unmounted).

Any ideas as to what's happening?

<honk>*:O)</honk>
Foamcow Heavy Industries - Web site design in Cheltenham and Gloucester
Earl & Thompson Marketing - Marketing Agency Services in Gloucestershire

 

[jmgalvin]

I don't know anything about osx server but had some problemw with outboard firewire drives in the past.

I had a failure to mount once after doing an osx upgrade (think it was to 10.3.7 or 8). It was fixed by reverting. Whatever the problem, it was fixed in the next osx upgrade.

One of the fixes for drives that don't mount is to hot plug it in. Making sure that the computer is on, plug in the drive and then turn on the drive . I don't know if osx server had disk utility but, if it does, you might try hot plugging and then see if the drive shows up in disk utility. That's soved a problem twice for me over the years.

Another trick, solving the problem of a drive that was unmounted from the desktop and won't remount, is to turn of the drive and the computer, unplug and replug the drive, turn on the drive and reboot the computer.

By the way, I'm assuming you tried plugging the drive into a different port, just to make sure the port didn't fail and that you used the same wire when you plugged it into the g5.

Using OSX 10.3.9 on a G4

 

[Foamcow]

Personally, I've not tried anything yet but have been going off the answers I got from the guy at work that was trying to fix the problem.

I think it's something to do with the tape drive which appears to be failing and I have a feeling that this External HDD was daisy chained through it.

I'm going to try some tests of my own tomorrow.

<honk>*:O)</honk>
Foamcow Heavy Industries - Web site design in Cheltenham and Gloucester
Earl & Thompson Marketing - Marketing Agency Services in Gloucestershire

 

[SYQUEST]

There have been some known Firewire chip set firmware issues with various versions of OS X. You might check support with the manufacturer of the device for any updates or resolves pertaining to this type of problem.

Hope this helps!

....JIM....

 

[Foamcow]

Nah, I fixed the problem.

User error I think.
I disconnected everything and reconnected it (with a replacement for the duff drive) a bit more senisbly and it all worked.

So I plugged the "broken" drive in and it worked fine.

I think they just hadn't connected things up right.


Not sure about the tape drive though, it still seems flakey. I will see if it works for tonight's backup.

<honk>*:O)</honk>
Foamcow Heavy Industries - Web site design in Cheltenham and Gloucester
Earl & Thompson Marketing - Marketing Agency Services in Gloucestershire