Mac OS X 10.3.7: SATA drives unmounting

Several readers have reported an issue with SATA drives spontaneously unmounting under Mac OS X 10.3.7.

One user writes: "I have a second internal SATA hard drive installed in a dual 1.8 G5 that refuses to mount on the first boot with 10.3.7. If I startup from a shutdown the drive won't mount, the mac doesn't even acknowledge that it is installed. A restart fixes the problem. This is not a hardware issue (at least as far as the drive is concerned) because this problem only started with 10.3.6 and if I boot with any earlier version the drive mounts every time. I tried an archive an install and then using the combo updater and that seemed to fix it for a few days but then it would not mount on the cold start."

MacFixIt reader Mike reports that the issue may only occur after a kernel panic in some cases:

"I had the same problem with my second SATA in my first generation dual 2 G5. The only time I noticed that it would happen was after a kernel panic. When the computer would reboot no second drive. I had to shut down and reboot to get it back, just rebooting did not work.

"I did not know if it was the drive or the computer so I swap out the drive with Maxtor for a new one. After rebooting I had two drive. No kernel panics as of yet with the new drive."

Daryl Klein adds:

"I recently added a Seagate 120GB SATA drive into my G5 dual-2Ghz three months ago. I had at that time OSX 10.3.6, and noticed that copying massive amounts of files was transferring a tad slower than usual. After installing OSX 10.3.7 through the Software Update...while trying to [copy] 1-5MB files off the drive, it started having a massive coronary trying to copy. The copying of about 200 files took 9 hours, after freezing and rebooting 45 times. The files would start to transfer, hesitate, transfer extremely slow again, then freeze. Hard rebooting each time allowed me to get most of it. I checked the disk with Disk Utility, and it said the drive was fine. But Apple Diagnostics [CD] stated there was some sort of I/O problem. As time went on and my hair got grayer, eventually it got to where I couldn't even open the disk icon without it freezing the finder. So, my only solution was to re-install [Panther] and re-format the drive. No such luck, so I downloaded and re-installed 10.3.7, and here I sit today with a 3 month old drive that is now unplugged.

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