Disappearing external drive

[Cemil]

I use a headless Mac Mini with 2 external drives attached: G-Drive (500MB) and G-Raid (2TB). The big drive has uncompressed files whilst the smaller ones has mp3.

 

For some reason I can no longer see G-Drive in Finder (under devices) or indeed iTunes. Clicking on any mp3 song on that drive does not result in any music playing.

 

However, I have the drive icon on my desktop and can click on it, see the contents. Double clicking on one of the tunes there fires up iTunes, loads the artwork, appears to load the song, but that doesn't play.

 

I have tried disconnecting the drive (got a warning that I should eject it before doing so) and reconnecting it without result. It appears that the drive is properly connected and operating normally, but neither Finder nor iTunes sees it.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[wgscott]

That's weird. Is it HFS+ formatted, or is it the default windows formatting? It shouldn't make a difference but sometimes it does. If it used to work and now stopped, it might be a filesystem corruption problem, which you can deter and maybe fix using Disk Utility.app. If you need to rescue files from it, post back, and I'll describe a few other options.

 

If you have another computer around, see if it works with that.

 

[Forehaven]

I agree, see what disk Utility has to say about the drive.

 

You can try this too: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379?viewlocale=en_US by resetting the pram

 

[wgscott]

"deter" should have read "detect" F-ing iPad.

 

[BobH]

Settings/General/ Keyboard/Auto-Correction = Off

 

Makes for a much less frustrating iPad

 

[AudioDoctor]

but I assure you , it is not intended to be. Have you power cycled the computer and drives?

 

Turn off the computer, turn off the drives, turn computer back on, turn drives back on.

 

It is worth a try if you have not tried that. After that, I would try disk utility and see what it says. Next step would be Diskwarrior

 

http://www.alsoft.com/diskwarrior/index.html

 

Hope it gets back to working.

 

[Cemil]

Thanks for all the help.

 

Actually, in the end I just dragged the drive icon from the desktop to the Finder window, and it now works perfectly!

 

I don't really get what happened, but am glad it is fixed.

 

[Stevef]

Thanks, BobH, for the setings tip. I'm tired of typng in latimes as a search and getting a page full of latinas. My wife was getting worried...

 

steve f