For me mac is a hard to use GUI for terminal, but the BSD tools from command line are OK. So I am a little bit on uncharted waters.
So you really see ramdisk? If you create a file and power cycle VS1010 the file is gone? If you can see it after power cycle, then the problem is stupid filesystem on eMMC.
I have also an another idea what could go wrong.
The emmc runlevel 1 file creates SD card device. Then it calls function to publish the SD card as mass media. USB isn't very long inactive so there might not be busreset and computer thinks everything is fine and doesn't update the device to show up the mass media.
Can you keep the board running without USB cable?
My next attack would be:
- Boot to runlevel 1
- Copy the emmc runlevel 1 file to ramdisk
- Disconnect USB cable without reseting VS1010
- OS should nag you that you are a bad person when you did such an horrible thing and didn't ejected the media properly
- Reconnect USB cable
- eMMC should appear
- Create file system/delete stuff/config.txt paramspl and format