A tip for those unmountable disks

By kurisu. Original by Lionel - 01/06/2004 06:47:07 CEST - Category: Hard Drive

Thank you Grégory for this tip which could very well be useful to some of us:

Hi,
I had a problem on my new AluBook.
Neither of my FW400 or FW800 disks, or disk images (.dmg or .img) would mount.
After a few searches on various forums (don't really remember which one though) I found the cause of the problem.
In the NetInfo database, I had to delete and then recreate the user "unknown" whose uid is 99.
After a reboot, it works...
Maybe this problem is also linked to the frame dropping issues certain people have been experiencing ?!
The steps are (be careful not to screw this up) :
Launch NetInfo (in /Applications/Utilities)
Click on the padlock and enter your admin password.
browse your way through "/", "users"
make a copy of a user account "nobody" for instance.
and change its values as per the following :
uid : 99
gid : 99
name : unknown
realname : Unknown User
_writers_passwd : unknown
Save the changes and then reboot.
When OS X mounts a disk, it does so under this user's account. (don't ask me why although I have my idea on the subject).
It turns out that if this user account is somehow messed up, disks won't mount.
I didn't have any problem with this user but deleting it and recreating it fixed my problem. I hope this will be of help to a few people, avoiding needless OS re-installs.