This entry was posted on Thursday, March 8th, 2007 at 9:39 PM and is filed under Apple, FreeBSD, Gadgets, Hardware, Mac, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I blogged the other day about an external harddrive I purchased made by Cavalry Storage. Today I experienced a little something weird happening between the drive and Mac OS X.
I took my laptop to work with me today because I was working on a number of ATMs and you never know when you’re going to need something when you’re at a remote site. As I was unmounting my 120GB drive and my new 500GB drive the 500GB wouldn’t unmount. The OS told me that the drive couldn’t be unmounted and to try closing some applications and repeat the process. Well, there weren’t any applications running, and I don’t even have any data stored on the drive currently. I never could get the drive to unmount cleanly so I just shutdown OS X and was on my way.
When I came home this evening, I plugged all of my nifty little peripherals back into my MacBook and fired it up. It made the cute little bootup sound a number of times but never loaded the OS or presented me with a logon prompt. I had experienced this behavior once before when I booted my laptop up with my iPod connected to the USB port.
To make sure that the issue wasn’t the unclean unmount, I tried unmounting the drive again and rebooting. This time the drive was able to be unmounted with no problems and the machine started the reboot process. Once again, when the machine started to boot back up it made the cute little “I’m Booting” sound and did it over, and over, and over again. I unplugged my USB hub from my laptop and it made the sound one more time and started the boot process normally.
Its strange. My 120GB drive has never done this. I leave it on all the time and plugged up to my Mac and it never hoses up the boot process. This only seems to happen with my iPod and this new drive… I had a similar issue a while back with my FreeBSD laptop and my iPod.
Is it a USB 2.0 thing? No. The USB IDE drive cage that my 120GB drive is in is also USB 2.0… Is the laptop actually trying to boot from these devices or are they just causing problems with the boot process? I’m stumped…
If anyone has any insight into why this may be happening, please post a comment. I would like to find a way around this if at all possible. I don’t want to have to unplug my peripherals each time I reboot my laptop. That’s crazy talk!
Until next time…
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