# Hard drive won't stay connected; un-mounts itself



## Sprtn036 (Oct 25, 2011)

An issue has arisen in the past day with my external hard drive where two of the three partitions will be recognized, but Finder will freeze up before un-mounting the disc, almost as though it's losing power.

I am running OSX Lion 10.7.2 on a late 2010 13" MacBook Pro (basic model). The hard drive is a Western Digital 2TB MyBook. It has three partitions, one Mac OS Extended (Journaled), one FAT32, and another Mac OS Extended (Journaled) that I have set up for Time Machine. I am also running Windows 7 Ultimate via Bootcamp.

Normally, when I plug the hard drive in, the Mac and Backup partitions appear after a few seconds, and the Windows partition (much more data stored than on the other two) shows up ~15-30s later. Now, The Mac and Windows partitions appear almost immediately, but the Backup never does. The hard drive will start 'thumping' (best way to describe it) for a good minute or two, then the entire drive disappears from the computer and the improper disconnect alert pops up. When unmounted and still plugged in, however, the activity light on the front of the drive remains lit solid.

I did reboot to Windows and try plugging in the drive there, and it showed up - absolutely no problems, including a file transfer, which leads me to believe my backup partition is corrupted. Recently, there have been a few inadvertent disconnects as well, but never during external disc activity.

Additionally, I have no desktop access at this time.

Is there anything I can do to figure out what's going on? The drive is not even 5 months old and has performed admirably until this.


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## sinclair_tm (Mar 11, 2005)

Is there any software updates for the drive for Lion? If it didn't work just fine in Windows, I would of thought that the drive is going bad.


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## Sprtn036 (Oct 25, 2011)

I hadn't even thought of that... I did update the driver and WD SmartWare, but I can't get the firmware update onto the hard drive since it won't stay mounted long enough. I tried doing it through Windows, but no matter what it keeps saying that my drive is still in use.


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## sinclair_tm (Mar 11, 2005)

You may need to leave it connected to Windows over night, as it may be indexing it.


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