The Problem:
Computer is up and running with usb drive(s) mounted and working fine. After restart or sleep, CERTAIN drives aren’t visible - they don’t show up on desktop, in disk utility, in system profiler, or in disk utility started from os x install disk.
• in 10.5: both sleep & restart cause problem to occur
• in 10.4: sleep causes problem to occur, but restart doesn’t cause any problem. when using a drive that exhibited the “problem” in 10.5; putting computer to sleep and waking on 10.4 causes drive to improperly eject, prompting “device removal” screen upon wake; drive disappears and can’t re-mount until power toggled.
The Quick Fix:
• Toggle hard drive power (turn hard drive off and on)
Problem is affect by (at least):
• enclosure manufacturer/model (in my household, the only 2 drives exhibiting this problem are acomdata usb enclosures with logic board: b112 rev 1.7 & b112 rev 1.5)
• *my maxtor, storecase, and other acomdata drives/enclosures don’t exhibit this problem*
Problem is not affected by:
• partition map scheme
• volume format
• physical usb port (on mac)
• particular computer (happens on both leopard machines - mini & powerbook, and one tiger machine - g5 dual 2.0)
• hard drive manufacturer
Things that don’t fix it:
• SMC reset
• PRAM reset (option+apple+p+r at startup)
• PMU reset (which also resets pram & nvram)
• 10.5.2 / 10.4.11 Combo Updater manually installed
Console Messages (messages appearing after restart has occurred and drive hasn’t shown up as expected):
*Leopard*
2/21/08 3:17:21 PM kernel USBF: 0.842 [0x2aa7d00] The IOUSBFamily is having trouble enumerating a USB device that has been plugged in. It will keep retrying. (Port 1 of hub @ location: 0×3d000000)
2/21/08 3:17:21 PM kernel USBF: 2.163 CSRHIDTransitionDriver[0x2ae5980](IOUSBCompositeDevice) GetFullConfigDescriptor(0) returned NULL
2/21/08 3:17:21 PM kernel USBF: 4.682 [0x2aa7d00] The IOUSBFamily was not able to enumerate a device.
*Tiger*
Feb 21 14:53:21 migG5 kernel[0]: USBF: 2335.189 [0x42aa000] The IOUSBFamily is having trouble enumerating a USB device that has been plugged in. It will keep retrying. (Port 2 of hub @ location: 0xb000000)
Feb 21 14:53:25 migG5 kernel[0]: USBF: 2338. 13 OHCI driver: OHCIRootHubPortPower bit not sticking (0). Retrying.
Feb 21 14:53:25 migG5 kernel[0]: USBF: 2338. 13 OHCI driver: OHCIRootHubPortPower bit not sticking (0). Retrying.
Feb 21 14:53:25 migG5 kernel[0]: USBF: 2338. 13 OHCI driver: OHCIRootHubPortPower bit not sticking (0). Retrying.
Feb 21 14:53:25 migG5 kernel[0]: USBF: 2338. 13 OHCI driver: OHCIRootHubPortPower bit not sticking (0). Retrying.
Feb 21 14:53:25 migG5 kernel[0]: USBF: 2338. 13 OHCI driver: OHCIRootHubPortPower bit not sticking (0). Retrying.
Feb 21 14:53:25 migG5 kernel[0]: USBF: 2338. 13 OHCI driver: OHCIRootHubPortPower bit not sticking (0). Retrying.
Feb 21 14:53:25 migG5 kernel[0]: USBF: 2338. 13 OHCI driver: OHCIRootHubPortPower bit not sticking (0). Retrying.
Feb 21 14:53:25 migG5 kernel[0]: USBF: 2338. 13 OHCI driver: OHCIRootHubPortPower bit not sticking (0). Retrying.
Feb 21 14:53:25 migG5 kernel[0]: USBF: 2338. 13 OHCI driver: OHCIRootHubPortPower bit not sticking (0). Retrying.
Feb 21 14:53:25 migG5 kernel[0]: USBF: 2338. 13 OHCI driver: OHCIRootHubPortPower bit not sticking (0). Retrying.
Feb 21 14:53:25 migG5 kernel[0]: USBF: 2338.813 [0x42aa000] The IOUSBFamily was not able to enumerate a device.
—
I’m interested if anyone else can duplicate this same problem or something similar with any other drives/enclosures (other then the 2 acomdata enclosures I have). Then we can look at the similarities and hopefully find out and fix the problem.
If no one else has this exact problem, perhaps it really is just an acomdata thing (as applecare suggested today on the phone). Perhaps it’s a chipset issue?
Any insight appreciated!
–
UPDATE: 2-21-08 9:00pm
So far I’ve tried 4 different Acomdata models, the only affected model is the “509 USB Series” hard drive enclosure. The other’s that do work fine are the 509 USB/Firewire, E5, and Samba series. I’ve also seen several posts about some IOMEGA external drives exhibiting this problem, but I don’t have a model number yet. So far, seems like a chipset issue… I’ll try contacting Acomdata to say if they can tell me the specific chipset, then perhaps Apple, to see if 10.4/10.5 have issues with that chipset.
9 users commented in " 10.5 certain external drives not mounting after restart or sleep; 10.4 …after sleep "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackUPDATE: Just e-mailed Acomdata tech support with all the details of this problem, awaiting response…
I had the same problem with my previous two put-together external hard drives. It turns out that a lot of hard drive cases are not ’smart’ enough for sleep mode on the computer. With my Lacie drives now, I can easily put my (Leopard 10.5.2) to sleep, and when I bring it back to the land of the awake, the drives are still happily working.
Nice website by the way, just found it by ‘accident’ (you wrote the name in a TUAW comment, I googled).
thanks for the comment dave!
do you happen to know the brand/model of the enclosures that couldn’t sleep properly?
do you know if they had the same problem with restarts?
was this in 10.5 or 10.4?
thanks!
brian
I have the same enclosure (Acomdata B 112 Rev1.5) and I’ve had the same issue with it since I’ve owned it. I just tried messing with it again today, and I can’t get it to show up at all anymore, even after unplugging it and leaving it off for a while.
I used to have to turn it off then back on, and it would ‘wake up’.
It’s been plugged in to my late-2007 24″ iMac for the last 6 months or so, but in stealth mode :)
Since it’s a pain to have to keep turning it on and off I haven’t been using it at all.
I think now that it’s unplugged I will just retire this enclosure and chalk it up as a lesson learned and stay away from the cheap enclosures. USB is a terrible interface for HDDs anyways. I’m going to grab another FW800 case and call it a day. For me, it’s just not worth the hassle and I don’t think a solution is to be found anywhere. :(
My 1TB LaCie BigDisk Extreme+ (via FW800) has been wonderful, but it’s just about full with less than 30gb remaining. Highly recommended.
I’ve been looking around for a new enclosure for some of my existing drives and I think I’ve found one that looks promising:
Mediasonic HUR1-SU2FWB on which I’ve read a positive review and they can be had for a reasonable price on eBay.
Good luck!
Hi Cory,
Thanks for the info! Good to know I’m not the only one. I think you’re definitely correct about buy cheaper enclosures.
If you don’t want to give up yet, you could look in Console to see if it’s giving you any strange messages when the drive is plugged in. That may help determine what’s needed to get it back up.
One word of caution about those big Lacie drives. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m quite sure they have 2 individual drives inside (at least they used to).
They are using a proprietary hardware RAID to make both drives look like 1. This means, when 1 drive dies or goes bad, the other drive goes down also and you loose everything. And because it’s a hardware RAID, with half the data on one drive, and half on the other, it’s almost impossible to do data recovery (MAYBE Drive Savers could).
In summary, having an external drive with 2 drives inside doubles the chance of the external drive dying when compared to an external drive with 1 drive inside. And it’s harder to recover the data if/when it does die. You may be fine, but i’d be sure to back it up daily.
I’m going to google the Mediasonic HUR1-SU2FWB now, thanks for the tip!
Brian
You are correct. There are 2×500gb drives in the enclosure in a RAID-0 (stripe) configuration. I keep everything on that drive backed up on DVD, so it works fine for me. The thing I like about it the most are the fast transfers. I average ~65MB/sec with this drive which is great! Compare that to ~20MB/sec on USB 2.0.
There really is no comparison…
The Mediasonic enclosure lets you choose either RAID-0 (stripe) or RAID-1 (mirror). Given the cheap price (and falling daily) of HDDs these days, there’s no excuse not to go with a RAID-1 configuration for extra security for your external drives, but in some situations, RAID-0 is fine as well.
Remember the golden rule, backup, backup, backup!
I have a Cosmos HC-3502H ext drive case/USB hub that can be seen here
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=HC-3502H&cat=CAS
with a 250G WD drive I installed. It exhibits the same problem when coming out of sleep mode - but not every time the Mac wakes up, maybe once a day or so…sometimes more, sometimes less.
I tried unchecking the “put hardrive(s) to sleep” option…didn’t make any difference. Only thing that brings the drive back is a power cycle of the case.
Fred,
Thanks for the info! I’ll be sure not to buy Cosmos HC-3502H’s in the future. Any problem with any other enclosures by Cosmos? I’ve actually never heard that brand… which backs up another train of thought behind this problem - don’t by the cheaper/cheapest (which is what I usually do). This must be another cheap-o with the poorer quality chipset.
FYI… I recently bought the NewerTech Mini Stack V2, similar to the HC-3502H. Although it worked fine for about 2-3 weeks, it suddenly died 2 days ago. It was not cheap, and certainly not the cheapest, and still had a problem (although not the same one related to this thread). Called NewerTech who told me to get an RMA # from the support section of the web site… yea, too bad that doesn’t exist!!
Frustrated!
I have a similar problem at least since Tiger with an mp3 player (Trekstor iBeat organix something). It sometimes works well, at other times it shows up in System Profiler, but neither in Finder nor anywhere else (e.g. formatting software).
With Tiger, this seemed to be caused by an iMate and its driver (OK, that *was* officially incompatible, but worked for a trackball), with Leopard I did not test systematically.
Annoying.