EXT HDD, Mounting/Unmounting 101

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TremoJem
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2013/05/17 07:20:17 (permalink)

EXT HDD, Mounting/Unmounting 101

 What is up here. My Seagate is not behaving and I bought a new Lacie and it is not mounting. So, the Seagate is old and I am not surprized...it has it's own power supply and even though I unmount it does not want to mount, in fact the disc tries to spin then sputters then starts the cycle again. After rebooting, unplugging both the power and USB cable from the Seagate, I am able to get it up and running, but this can take several combinations of this to get it to work, so of course I backed it up and don't rely on it, BUT. My new Lacie has a feature to sleep if not used for five minutes and I unmounted it the night before (just use the system tray and tell it to let me eject the Lacie, NO cable disconnect) and now I can't get it to mount, or in other words I don't see it in my WinExplorer and can't wake it up or mount it. So...now I have to physically disconnect the cable to wake it up. What am I doing wrong. Can someone provide the correct way to manage an external HDD with regards to it's connectivity, both physical and non-physical and what it needs in order to work properly for a long time. I don't want the disk spinning when I am away from the unit so I thought sleep mode or unmount...please let me know, thanks.

Purrrfect Audio LLC Pro Studio, Sonar X3e PE X64, Win7 Pro 64Bit - Dell Inspiron 1760, Sonar 7 PE X64, Win7 Pro 64Bit - iZotope Ozone 5 & Alloy 2 - MOTU Audio Express & 2 MOTU 8Pre - Glyph & Lacie External HDs - Roland A-800Pro - Mackie MR5mkIII - Shure - AKG - Sennheiser
 
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    slartabartfast
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    Re:EXT HDD, Mounting/Unmounting 101 2013/05/17 14:45:55 (permalink)
    One thing to try for the Seagate problem would be to assign a static drive letter to the device. Windows can remember the ID number of the drive, and always assign it to the same letter. So you can set up the computer to mount the Seagate as drive M: for example and the Lacie as drive N: even though they are using the same USB socket. Otherwise it will assign sequential numbers to each partition at boot up using a rather arcane order, and it may depending on how the computer is configured try to boot from the external drive and timeout or fail if it does not find a boot sector. Make sure you have the proper boot sequence assigned in BIOS to avoid this. Except in certain circumstances you should have the BIOS option to boot from USB disabled. It is also possible that the Seagate is defective.

    http://www.howtogeek.com/96298/assign-a-static-drive-letter-to-a-usb-drive-in-windows-7/


    The Lacie drive problem you describe is expected behavior. If you logically remove a USB drive, it is irrelevant whether you physically remove the drive-it is not accessible. In order for the computer to know that you want it to re-mount that drive, you need to physically disconnect it and plug it back in. The connection triggers Windows to interrogate the drive, check for drivers (which are stored from previous use of the drive or downloaded from the drive when connected) and mount it. If the Lacie is just not powering on, that could be a problem (feature) of the power saving system on the drive.


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    TremoJem
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    Re:EXT HDD, Mounting/Unmounting 101 2013/05/20 06:27:27 (permalink)
     Thanks for the reply. I am confident the 7 year old Seagate is defective. The lacie works great if I unplug and plug in the cable. I guess the feature that puts it to sleep is not capable of waking it up without this physical action. Thanks for the static drive information. This will be useful. I intend to have two dedicated external hdd, one for each laptop and then use a 32GB thumbdrive to transfer audio files from one to the other. I use one laptop for audio capturing or recording the band. I then use a separate room with a separate laptop (both using Sonar 7PE) for mixing and mastering. I keep all audio files on the external hdds. So I think that creating static drive letter will help when I transfer from one laptop to another using the thumbdrive. Thanks again.

    Purrrfect Audio LLC Pro Studio, Sonar X3e PE X64, Win7 Pro 64Bit - Dell Inspiron 1760, Sonar 7 PE X64, Win7 Pro 64Bit - iZotope Ozone 5 & Alloy 2 - MOTU Audio Express & 2 MOTU 8Pre - Glyph & Lacie External HDs - Roland A-800Pro - Mackie MR5mkIII - Shure - AKG - Sennheiser
     
    Most importantly...not enough time.
     
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    jim@studiocat.com
     
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