# G5 Mac stopped seeing FireMax External Drive!! Now What?



## Martial33 (Nov 1, 2002)

This is a pretty new drive, about 4 months I guess. Its a FireMax aluminum enclosure with an 800 port that connects to the rear of the G5.

intermittently, its been not recognizable.

I took it back to the store, they tried it on their machine and it worked fine.

brought it back (to my machine) and it worked fine until now...I cannot get the G5 to see it at all!

I try turning it on after the computer is running as well as before I turn the computer on, but either way the computer will not see the drive.

there are supposed to be two blue lights inside the grill in the front. right now there is only only light on but even when both were on, the G5 would not see it.

the enclosure houses two SATA drives which area RAIDed together as one.

I have lots of data on the drives.

Now what? is it the external drive or something in the G5?

Is there any sort of "refresh" thing I can do?

Disk Utility will not see the drive either.


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## Serge_N_Gin (Sep 7, 2004)

Hi Martial33,

Do you have all the latest Software Updates installed? Make sure you disconnect the external before running the Update ..


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## Martial33 (Nov 1, 2002)

Serge_N_Gin

come to think of it, I do recall a recent update that loaded itself not long ago. could have that made a difference?

I also found out that even if you put the computer into sleep mode, you should eject the external before hand which I did not do on the last time. Could have that caused a problem?

...ok wait a second.. I just turned it on again (the external drive) and now the computer at least "sees it". I ran "disk utility" on it and it says that "one slice" of the RAID mirror FAILED!

it says "Mirrored RAID set - Degraded"

when I click "Rebuild" it says that it will wipe everything clean. Does this mean everything on both "slices" of the drive? or just the corrupt half? - in which case, shouldn't it be able to rewrite itself from one half back to the other?

could this be HEAT related cause it runs REALLY hot! the aluminum case is even hot to the touch! 

since I just turned it back on, and the computer sees it now, its been off for the whole day =. do you think that could be a factor?


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## Serge_N_Gin (Sep 7, 2004)

Hi Martial33,

I just found these lil' tidbits:



> _Note: It is recommended that both disks be brought up on-line during boot time and not ejected during the session. If one disk becomes offline (or one disk is brought online before the other), the RAID set may become degraded and require a rebuild for fault tolerant operations_.





> _If you unplug the external drive, it will change the array status to "Degraded" and show the external drive as "offline." Plug it back in, and it should show the external drive as "rebuilding."_


it seems too much of a risk if your data is on the line .... if you do have a current backup of the data on the raid disc then a rebuild should fix it. Either way you should do a complete backup of the data first.

Your enclosure shouldn't get that hot and this can lead to data loss/drive failure if left unchecked. Look around for another enclosure that has a fan or buy a fan to put into your enclosure if there's room. I recommend running a fan in the room to cool the enclosure down in the interim or stop using the disc until you get an internal fan running ....




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## Martial33 (Nov 1, 2002)

Serge & Gin

I was told that a "rebuild" will wipe out the entire RAID - not just the corrupt mirrow half?


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