Anyone familiar with macs & external hard drive issues?

Jay Rodriguez

Jay Rodriguez

Coffee Member
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?
 
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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...
 
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.
 
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?
 
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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?
 
coffee said:
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?
Click to expand...

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

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. 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.
 
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?
 
Terry_Lasater said:
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?
Click to expand...

buy drives and stick them in cases from OWC, no problems (knock on hard drive)
 
Terry_Lasater said:
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?
Click to expand...
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...
 
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.
 
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