Anyone familiar with macs & external hard drive issues?

[Jay Rodriguez]

It appears that my external hard drive that held most of my film material is messed up. It's not being recognized by my mac and the drive was really hot when I touched it.

I have to try to figure this out, I have 100's of hours of edited material in this one film that I was almost finished with. :crybaby:

Does anyone know anything about this type of stuff, what might of happened and how I might be able to recover the drive?

[Jared Meyer]

Is this the first time you've tried to access that drive with the mac?

[Jay Rodriguez]

no, I've been working off of it for about 7 months now.

[filmismymedium]

http://www.drivesavers.com

[ullanta]

Is it a LaCie? If so, you've been warned... but it there are some tricks.

Does the drive have a fan? I'm concerned if the heat was unusual... it may have cooked itself, which would be less promising for you to be able to do anything yourself...

[J Michael]

Sometimes the external housing electronics get hosed and you can put the drive in a different housing or mount it in a system as an internal drive.

[Jay Rodriguez]

No the drive does not have a fan and it's in a cased in extrenal hard drive unit.

This really suck, I have most of my work on this drive. This is sooooo discouraging.

Are you suppossed to shut these external drives off when not in use? Meaning if you were finished for the night, should you shut the drive off?

[MalcolmOng]

Thats what i try to do... You sure it isn't the file format problem? You know how macs can't handle NTFS, and can only modify FAT32 file systems?

[Brandon Rice]

Are you suppossed to shut these external drives off when not in use? Meaning if you were finished for the night, should you shut the drive off?

I usually shut it off. I'd try switching the external case for it, the case may have a bad connection...

[Jay Rodriguez]

yeah but when i reboot, the mac sees there is a new drive attached and asks if I want to format the new unformatted drive.

[ian lucero]

Do you have a way of taking out the drive itself and installing it internally into a tower or another external case. Try that and tell us what happens.

[eignacio]

I had the same problem when I accidentally used my 250GB lacie hard drive power cord on my Terabyte lacie hard drive. (and vice versa).
Check your powercords to see if you didn't accidentally switch them.

[Jay Rodriguez]

ian lucero,
I took the drive out of the external case and opened the mac to see if I could put it in there as a slave drive but now I know that the mac hard drives have different connection pins from the external drive. I'm going to bring the external case back to where I bought it from a few months ago and see if it'll work with another case.

eignacio,
I didn't unplug/plug the drive in at all. It wasn't touched in a few days. I went to sleep, woke up and got on the mac. When I opened FCP it gave me that wtf is the scratch disk msg, lol.

[JasonFox]

First thing is to find another Mac to plug it into. If the same message comes up, you may have to send it off to a recovery place, or try something like FileSalvage.

[Jay Rodriguez]

Does FileSalvage perform on an external drive that the mac os isn't recognizing as a formatted drive?

[Blaine]

Jay,

I had a fatal failure of a LaCie drive early this year. You should try three things before going to a disk recovery service. Make sure the firewire cable is good. See if a different Mac can see the drive (I took it to the Mac store) and see if the drive itself works in a different case. If it doesn't you may need to call a disk recovery service which can become expensive. About the best one out there is Drivesavers (http://www.drivesavers.com/). They'll ask some questions to determine what you've got. Hopefully it's just a single drive and not a double drive. My LaCie was a 500 GB drive with two 250 GB drives inside. Because of the setup it was considered a RAID and cost me twice as much as a single drive would have.

Feel free to PM me with any questions.

[Terry_Lasater]

Aaaarrrgh! I, too, have had troubles with LaCie drives. This year, I had two of them die. One was only three months old. They used to be considered among the best... (several years ago). What brand of external drives do you use now, Blaine?

[sink]

Aaaarrrgh! I, too, have had troubles with LaCie drives. This year, I had two of them die. One was only three months old. They used to be considered among the best... (several years ago). What brand of external drives do you use now, Blaine?

buy drives and stick them in cases from OWC, no problems (knock on hard drive)

[Blaine]

Aaaarrrgh! I, too, have had troubles with LaCie drives. This year, I had two of them die. One was only three months old. They used to be considered among the best... (several years ago). What brand of external drives do you use now, Blaine?
I'm using Maxtor's right now. I've had no problems with them. But I still back up all the time--just in case. Once burned...

[cinemakinoeye]

If you find out the problem is not hardware-related, I'd suggest running Disk Warrior and see if it can recognize the drive. If the corruption is utimately disk structures rather than hardware, Disk Warrior might be able to rebuild the file structures on the disk. Twice in the past four years I've succesfully used Disk Warrior to resurrected messed up disks for me. If the drive does not respond to any software utility, it may have a hardware related problem. Then it's time for a data recovery service if you are unable to recapture the media from tape.

[ullanta]

LaCie is crap; never use 'em!

Coffee - you haven't answered if the heat was unusual for the drive. You should definitely turn off drives when not in use - all electronics degrade (albeit perhaps slowly) when powered. Fanless drives can easily cook themselves.

Dare I say it, you should have a backup drive that you keep copies of important stuff on, which you refresh regularly. Drives will all eventually fail.

Most important, perhaps, is that you should try the drive in another enclosure, but DON'T RUN ANY CONSUMER RECOVERY SOFTWARE and DON'T TRY TO WRITE ANYTHING TO THE DRIVE until you've decided for sure that you won't be sending it to a recovery service. Everything you try to do will make their job harder or impossible.

Of course, if you had a Glyph drive, they'd handle this for free: http://glyphtech.com/site/support/datarecovery.html

[cinemakinoeye]

LaCie is crap; never use 'em! [...] I will second that, based on the design issue that, at least for the LaCie triple-interface drives, they run hot, hotter than other drives like the G-Tech, which are a better value, if for no other reason, they run cooler, at least in my experience, as I've used both.

[Chris Messineo]

I use a G-Tech drive as my daily work drive and a Lacie for backups.

Jay, if there is anything I can do to help, just let me know,

Chris

[JY_Blue]

if you use a recovery software, I think the two standards are disk warrior and data rescue.

if you are going to send the drive out for recovery service then the above advice- don't run anything on it- is good advice. the more you do, the more potential that info on the drive will be overwritten and not recoverable.

in weighing your options, my understanding/experience is that these services will be very expensive and the consumer software can be quite helpful. disk warrior and data rescue are in the $80-$100 price range. i used them recently to clone a drive and resurrect it. if you do this yourself, be aware that it can take a lot of time. it can be hard to be patient when you fear the loss of so much work. but if you can spare the loot and absolutely can not loose your data, you may be best served by further researching recovery services.

for further support, if you go to the apple website:

-- click on the support tab
-- click on the discussions link
-- click on your model computer

this will lead you to a bulletin board similar to dvxuser where you will be able to find data recovery topics with helpful users like the ones on this board.

best of luck. really hope things work out for you. if you think I can be of further assistance, don't hesitate to send me a message.

[Arrow]

It looks like the drive is on it's last leg, If you are near an apple store or a computer store you trust and work with take the drive in and ask for help in recovering what data you can from the drive. Do not use the drive or attempt to reformat it or all is lost.

I have hand a problem like this last year and with the help of a apple tech at tha apple store did recover 75% of what was on the drive. As for your question of leaving the drive on all the time when you working on the computer the drive is on when the computer is off make sure the drive is off .

Because of the problem you are having I switched for Lacie to Seagate drives.

I wish you good luck.

[Jay Rodriguez]

Ok, thanks guys. I downloaded and installed FileSalvage last night and it's still running and reading something from the drive. I'm just hoping that when I get home it'll have good news for me.

JY, that's a nice forum they have over there. I signed up and will keep close to that forum. Thanks man.

ullanta, no that wasn't normal for the drive to get that hot.... not good.

[JY_Blue]

Coffee-

just an fyi: I don't know the specifics of filesalvage, but my experience with data rescue and disk warrior is that they would run 8-12 hrs per run cycle. I was informed that it is possible for them to run quickly, or to take several days. Just mentioning it because I aborted several cycles thinking it was stuck and that turned out not to be the case.

Glad you liked the forum, the response wasn't as quick as it can be on here, but there were very smart and helpful users, if you give them a day or so to get back to you.

[Jay Rodriguez]

Yeah I noticed that as I was filtering through old threads over there.

I ran filesalvage for about 5 hours and noticed that it was maybe 7-10% into reading the drive. I'll keep you/everyone on the progress (if any).... this sucks hard core.

[JY_Blue]

Following is another forum I found helpful:

http://forums.macnn.com/

[Steve Strickland]

If you don't have any success with filesavage, definitely give DiskWarrior a try. I used it a couple of weeks ago to repair an external drive with excellent results. Why do these things always seem to happen when projects are just about finished? Good luck.

[Beat Takeshi]

Not to jinx myself but lacie has been good to me but Maxtor has been the worst. 5 Maxtor drives died on me so far in the last few years and all my others including Lacie have been strong. I never shut off my machines or drives by hand, I use the power saver feature but they say not to keep shutting off anything because the constant heating and cooling off of the components wear them down faster.

[Jay Rodriguez]

damn!!!!!!! Filesalvage produced nothing, not even one file.......

moving onto DiskWarrior now. :(

[cinemakinoeye]

Disk Warrior has done a very good job for me recovering disks that have had corrupted file structures. It's been a standard tool in my kit since the first day I started using Mac OS X. Backups are the best prevention, and for "soft" crashes, Disk Warrior is the best cure. File recovery services can be very expensive, best thing to avoid having to call them is to have a solid backup strategy.