Leopard missing hard drive bug

Filed Under Apple

Many people (including myself) may have panicked a little when Leopard did not recognize their internal hard drive. It will, however, locate an external hard drive if you have one connected. There should be no reason to use disk utility or resort to a clean install if this happens to you.

After doing some research on the Apple support forums, I found a simple suggestion and solution in this discussion: just wait. It took my computer a few minutes before my hard drive appeared grayed out and then a minute later I was able to select it. Other people have reported it took up to 15 minutes for their hard drive to appear. It should not make any difference whether you have Disk Utility open or not.

Forum member ‘fancontrol’ explains what is most likely happening:

When Leopard checks for available installation volumes it does a quick check to find out if the file system is dirty/clean. If the file system is dirty than Leopard does a full file system-check on that volume. This process is running in the background and makes the volume disappear. The file system check can take up to 20 minutes depending on the size, speed and number of files on your drive. Once the file system check is finished, the volume should reappear. As it turns out the file system check on Leopard works different than on Tiger.

Apple should really have included a progress bar when the check is running (rather than doing it in the background) and letting the user know what is going on.

I definitely agree, a progress bar would have been smart. My total install took over an hour and went very smooth otherwise. I did the default upgrade and everything was exactly as I had left it in Tiger which was very comforting.

Comments

4 Responses to “Leopard missing hard drive bug”

Johnny Rodgers on October 30th, 2007 2:14 pm

It took Leopard about 4 minutes to present my internal HD in the Select a Destination dialogue. Anxious 4 minutes, I’ll tell you! A progress bar, or at least a status message (”Checking file system of available drives…”) seems like an obvious remedy to this. Goddamn Apple!
Gary Haley on November 7th, 2007 10:24 am

I quit the installer when it reported that my disk should be reformatted as its formatting was not compatible with Leopard.
I then couldn’t boot from the volume and had to rescue data in target firewire mode before reformatting the disk and installing Leopard.
Seems to be working OK but none of the iLife apps were installed at all!
Miguel on February 20th, 2008 3:13 pm

This is a crock of jelly. Why aren’t people up in arms about what is cearly a dev error?
“Hmmm, just wait….” what a bunch of hogwash. My installer is out of comission and I am out of $140.
Steven Sroba on April 9th, 2008 12:00 am

I noticed this issue but didn’t wait.. Rebooted back to Tiger and the volume was visible. Deleted the custom icon I had for the disk, restarted the install and it instantly found the HD.