Western Digital External USB Hard Drive being stubborn

[johnstonf]

I am using Fusion 3.0.2 on MacBookPro.

I have a few external hard drives, and ALL of them work nicely

in my WindowsXP vm when I connect.

I have "ONE" different one... a Western Digital 1TB "WD Elements",

a 1TB formatted as NTFS (same as others I have). This one, when

I plug it in, gets attached to the OSX host. Then when I click the icon

for it in my vm, and click Connect... OSX then pops up and says

"The host is currently using the device "Western Digital External HDD".

When I press OK, it then pops up again, and won't let go. Then I force

it by unplugging it, and select my XP vm, and attach it again, and this

time it usually will mount into my vm, but certainly not always.

Then after about 2 minutes, it will wake up in the vm, and start

scanning it, where I can then select to open it, etc.

At this point it works ok.

What is causing the OSX side from trying to grab it and hang on so

hard to it?

Fred

[rcardona2k]

It's probably spotlight trying to index the drive. Does it have a lot of flles on it? Watch for disk or cpu activity from a process called "mds", that's the tale sign.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Did you install the western digital software on the Mac? It grabs the disks and won't let go. There's also a hidden partition that get's mounted on the disk every time you plug it in (which you can't delete since it's in the enclosure firmware) - very very annoying.

If the virtual machine has focus, and is set to auto-connect USB devices, you can plug it in and windows will directly mount it first.

[WoodyZ]

I have a number of USB Drives that I really do not want to mount automatically under OS X however I want the USB Drives to be available to the Virtual Machines and I use entries in the

fstab

file to keep these drives from mounting automatically under OS X.

The

fstab

file typically does not exist so to create it bring up a

Terminal

and type the following command:

sudo nano /etc/fstab

Next add an appropriate entry on a single line and then save the file and exit

nano

.

As a example I have a USB Thumb Drive that is labeled "WINONLY" and that I only use under Windows and don't want OS X mounting it or indexing it and I have given it a unique name from the other USB drives that I attach from time to time so in the

fstab

file I have the following entry.

LABEL=WINONLY none msdos rw,noauto 0 0

If yours is formatted

NTFS

then change:

msdos

to

ntfs

along with the

LABEL

to what you have named the drive.

On a similar note I have FireWire Drives that I only want available at certain times to OS X and these are not used with Virtual Machines and in this case I use the UUID of the FireWire Drive as in the example below I have an old small drive I boot the Mac with to test certain things I don't want messing up my primary boot volume so booting the Mac with this is helpful. The first line below is just a comment so I know which drive that UUID belongs to without having to look it back up in Disk Utility.

# Leopard_FW2 - 27.5 GB Testing Volume  - Leopard_FW2 Volume
UUID=2A52C767-AE89-357C-85E7-64A6B68B5434 none hfs rw,noauto

So if you do not want a drive automatically mounting under OS X when you plug it in then this is a way of keeping it from being mounted automatically.

[johnstonf]

i do see the mds process, but it's using 0% cpu.

[johnstonf]

Also, when I try to nicely dismount it in OSX, i get a message "The disk "Elements" is in

use and could not be ejected. Try quitting applications and try again. (ok). So the I have

to physically unplug it, and try again.

[johnstonf]

That sounds interesting... I'll have to try that. So from the above error I get when

I try to eject it "The disk "Elements" is in use and could not be ejected"... is

"Elements" the name I should use??

[WoodyZ]

Yes

Also just so you know if you need to mount it under OS X once you've added it to the fstab file then you can go into Disk Utility and select it and click the Mount button once you've disconnected it from the Virtual Machine.

[johnstonf]

I have now done that:

LABEL=Elements none ntfs rw,noauto 0 0

but it still mounts... do i need to reboot for that??

/f

[WoodyZ]

No you should not have to reboot, I never do and it works for me as I edit the fstab on the fly from time to time.

The LABEL needs to be spelled the same way it is shown under Disk Utility under Info > Name:

Hint: You also can add multiple lines with different case spellings like one line each with one for proper case, upper case and lower case so this because a catch all for that Name.

BTW I'm headed out for next 6 hours so I will not be able to respond to further replies until I get back.

[ColoradoMarmot]

It may be mounting the firmware volume as well. The only workaround I've found is to mount direclty in Fusion first.

[johnstonf]

Still doing it even with the line in... is there a way to put a wildcard, so

I can say "don't mount ANYTHING" for the time i'm doing this one, to

test if it might be some other name? From what I can see it is called

"Elements", and WHEN it FINALLY mounts in my XP vm (it can

take 10-15 minutes (and things are SLOW during that period) before

it opens the "scan" and I can say "Open in folder". After that, the

drive works JUST FINE, and my speed resumes to normal.

This is a WEIRD drive! (i have others that are no problem...)