A hard disk that all of a sudden stops the boot process

[aadm]

My system is fairly well used. It's a beautiful(*) little hackintosh with an i5, 16Gb of ram, an internal SSD and a 2Tb hard drive, plus I've had for 1 year now this other 2Tb disk connected externally via USB2. No major issues so far. I've recently upgraded to 10.9.4 and all works perfectly.

Well until recently, when I could not boot my sytem anymore. Meaning that right after the BIOS Post, just before loading OS X, when there's the little rotating bar made with ASCII characters in the upper left corner, this rotating bar stop right in the middle and the system just hangs.

What I have found is that if I disconnect this external 2Tb disk then the system boots just fine. And after that, i can reconnect the external hard disk (which I use for backups) via usb and this disk works perfectly. Tried to run permission repairs, verified the disk through disk utility and no problems came up.

So what I did is take the 2Tb disk out of the USB enclosure and connect it to the external SATA connector of the motherboard (for those of you that don't know this fairly old but good m/b, this is the specs: http://www.gigabyte.no/products/page/mb/ga-h61n-usb3rev_10/specs).

The result is the same; the system hangs if I have this drive connected. No matter if I connect it via usb or eSATA.

So does anybody have an idea on how to fix it? Could it just be an internal mechanical problem of the drive (forecasting an impeding failure which is terrifying to me as I have all precious backups stored here) which the standard tools in Disk Utility cannot recognize? Or anything else at all (I also played with some BIOS settings but went back to the standard settings that have been recommended here on tonymac)?

Thanks everyone for any help or suggestion you can throw.

Alessandro

(*) not really, it's just a small ugly black box with some random stickers on. But it's costed me 1/4 of an iMac and I have been able to upgrade it in these years with no major issues. The beauty of hackintoshes!

 

[WonkeyDonkey]

My system is fairly well used. It's a beautiful(*) little hackintosh with an i5, 16Gb of ram, an internal SSD and a 2Tb hard drive, plus I've had for 1 year now this other 2Tb disk connected externally via USB2. No major issues so far. I've recently upgraded to 10.9.4 and all works perfectly.

Well until recently, when I could not boot my sytem anymore. Meaning that right after the BIOS Post, just before loading OS X, when there's the little rotating bar made with ASCII characters in the upper left corner, this rotating bar stop right in the middle and the system just hangs.

What I have found is that if I disconnect this external 2Tb disk then the system boots just fine. And after that, i can reconnect the external hard disk (which I use for backups) via usb and this disk works perfectly. Tried to run permission repairs, verified the disk through disk utility and no problems came up.

So what I did is take the 2Tb disk out of the USB enclosure and connect it to the external SATA connector of the motherboard (for those of you that don't know this fairly old but good m/b, this is the specs: <http://www.gigabyte.no/products/page/mb/ga-h61n-usb3rev_10/specs/>).

The result is the same; the system hangs if I have this drive connected. No matter if I connect it via usb or eSATA.

So does anybody have an idea on how to fix it? Could it just be an internal mechanical problem of the drive (forecasting an impeding failure which is terrifying to me as I have all precious backups stored here) which the standard tools in Disk Utility cannot recognize? Or anything else at all (I also played with some BIOS settings but went back to the standard settings that have been recommended here on tonymac)?

Thanks evryone for any help or suggestion you can throw.

Alessandro


(*) not really, it's just a small ugly black box with some random stickers on. But it's costed me 1/4 of an iMac and I have been able to upgrade it in these years with no major issues. The beauty of hackintoshes!

A little suggestion based on what you have said. Since this is a backup disk, you may like to consider leaving it disconnected anyway until you are ready to backup. Its not a great idea to have it permanently connected, and if it works after booting by manually plugging it in, then why not do it that way.

It may be that when booting, your system is trying to examine it as a possible boot volume but not finding the necessary information. And since you said you recently upgraded to 10.9.4, did this boot issue start at about the same time ?

Also, what disk/partition format did you use on it when it was originally setup ?

 

[aadm]

Thanks for the reply Wonkey. Yes for the time being I see no particular issue in pluggin the disk in only for backups. But still I was wondering whether this problem could be related to some mechanical problem which are still undetected by Disk Utility or what.

Anyway, the upgrade to 10.9.4 and this issue are not correlated (I think), meaning that I upgraded my OS some time ago and all was working fine, then after a while I started having this issue.

Finally this disk is in the standard os x format, which right now I cant recall how its' called (I'm at work away from my hackintosh). One thing I coudl try as soon as I get a new external drive I have recently ordered is just to reformat this disk again and see if the problem is still there.

ciao
Alessandro

 

[WonkeyDonkey]

Thanks for the reply Wonkey. Yes for the time being I see no particular issue in pluggin the disk in only for backups. But still I was wondering whether this problem could be related to some mechanical problem which are still undetected by Disk Utility or what.

Anyway, the upgrade to 10.9.4 and this issue are not correlated (I think), meaning that I upgraded my OS some time ago and all was working fine, then after a while I started having this issue.

Finally this disk is in the standard os x format, which right now I cant recall how its' called (I'm at work away from my hackintosh). One thing I coudl try as soon as I get a new external drive I have recently ordered is just to reformat this disk again and see if the problem is still there.

ciao
Alessandro

A point of note for you, not a fix though. I notcied in 10.9.3 and 10.9.4 that whenever copying large amounts of data from an external drive (USB & Firewire, both on my hackintosh and real mac), I have seen regular delays or pauses in the copying, even though the disk activity light is still active. System logs show multiple entries of this type :

Sandbox: mdworker(524) deny file-read-xattr

With the details of the filename added to the end. Also I see multiple entries relating to the sandboxing and xpc services. The bigger selection of data I make to copy, the more times it happens, and eventually it tells me there is an error due to the disk being disconnected even though it is still plugged in.

I did search the apple forums, and the issue has been well identified by other users and apple have responded to those who reported the error, saying that their engineering teams were aware of the issue and are working on a fix for it.

This may or may not be related to your issue.

The last couple of versions of OSX have not worked well for me when using external USB drives, although connecting them at USB2 helped mitigate things a bit for me.

 

[aadm]

Good info. I'll also have a look at the system logs.