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robby818 · Jun 16, 2004, 04:48 PM

FireWire Hell.

Last night I attempted to move my data files (pics, music, etc) from a FireWire HD�an IBM 80 GB hard drive in an enclosure w/ an Oxford 911 chip to my new G5. On its first attempt, the drive mounted w/o any problems. While I was transferring a 10 gig folder, the drive slowed to a crawl . I cancelled the transfer and soon experienced a kernel panic. I shut down the computer, disconnected the firewire drive, re-booted and re-connected the firewire drive. The firewire drive sounded like it was repeatedly trying to start up but couldn�t. After about 12 attempts, it finally did mount. I ran disk first aid. I then copied my data off the drive, up until transfer rates again slowed to a crawl and I had to cancel the data transfer. Of course, when I restarted my Mac the FireWire drive again refused to mount. it was 4:30 in the morning so I gave up for the night�

This afternoon, I took the IBM drive out of the enclosure and replaced it w/ a spare WesternDigital 120 GB drive. The WD drive works fine in the enclosure so I suspect there is some issue w/ the IBM drive�I suspect that the data is still on the IBM drive but some type of corruption is preventing me from mounting it as a firewire drive.

There are 20 pictures (~50 megs) still on the bad IBM drive and I would really like to recover those pictures.

What do you recommend?

I thought about the following:

1. Hook the IBM drive up as a second internal hard drive to a G4 Powermac (IDE connection). I no longer have my old G4 so I was thinking about going to the Apple store to see if they still have a G4 that i could use�.

2. I also have a PC. MacDrive allows a PC to read HFS+ drives, but if anyone knows of a free alternative I'd be happy to hear about it.

3. If I temporarily disconnected the DVD drive from my G5 and hooked it up to this IDE hard drive, would that work?

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. I�m just thankful that I didn�t lose everything.

tooki · Jun 17, 2004, 12:49 AM

#3 would work, indeed.

Regardless, it sounds as if the drive is dying, in which case it's basically irrelevant how it's connected. It's unlikely that it's corruption causing the problem -- the behavior you describe is not consistent with corruption.

You have two options: keep attempting to get the drive to spin up and work (risking further damage to the drive), or sending it off to a recovery service, which has high likelihood of recovering the data, but at exorbitant cost.

If you try to again attempt access to the drive, see if you can remember what file it stopped at, and try resuming on the next file, skipping the one that it got stuck on. (Better to lose one file than to lose them all!)

tooki

Graymalkin · Jun 17, 2004, 06:00 AM

Tip: When you want to copy a bunch of files between drives hold down Option while you drag the files to copy them.

When you're moving files between drives it is best to copy them instead of move them in case there is some problem with the transfer. Leaving the original files will give you a chance to retry the process if anything goes wrong. Once the files are copied and everything is green you can go ahead and delete the duplicate files on the original drive. I do this when moving stuff from my Powerbook to my network share. I want to make sure everything is copied properly before I delete the original files.

-Q- · Jun 17, 2004, 06:37 AM

Originally posted by Graymalkin:
Tip: When you want to copy a bunch of files between drives hold down Option while you drag the files to copy them.

If you're copying files from an external drive, isn't that the default action of the OS/Finder? Option is only necessary if you're copying files from one folder on the same drive to another...

robby818 · Jun 17, 2004, 12:50 PM

Thank you all for the suggestions. When I said "moved" I meant copied. In the end I found a shareware app that allowed me to recover the "deleted" 20 missing pictures from the digital camera's compact flash card. That way i didn't have to deal w what sounds like a failing hard drive.

While researching my problem, I found a firmware update for my firewire drive on the OWC website and I upgraded the firmware on the FireWire drive from 1.x to 3.x.

I should have backed up twice and not have relied soley on the firewire drive. I had a lot of confidence in firewire drives before all of this.

MaxPower · Jun 17, 2004, 01:54 PM

Was it an IBM 75GXP Deskstar by any chance? Those are known to fail frequently. Do a google on 'IBM Deathstar'

maxintosh · Jun 17, 2004, 03:44 PM

Originally posted by -Q-:
If you're copying files from an external drive, isn't that the default action of the OS/Finder? Option is only necessary if you're copying files from one folder on the same drive to another...

Yeah... dragging files to another volume always copies them.

tooki · Jun 17, 2004, 05:08 PM

Originally posted by robby818:
I should have backed up twice and not have relied soley on the firewire drive. I had a lot of confidence in firewire drives before all of this.

There's no evidence that FireWire had anything to do with the problem.

tooki

robby818 · 12:17 AM

Originally posted by tooki:
There's no evidence that FireWire had anything to do with the problem.

tooki

In researching a fix for my problem I learned that many users experienced data loss on their firewire drives after the 10.3 update.

Although it certainly doesn't mean firewire connected hard drives are unreliable, just that I shouldn't have placed all of my faith in it as i did bec stuff happens--the hard drive could fail or an OS update could cause all the data to go bye-bye.

i will continue to use firewire drives but i have learned not to place all my eggs in one basket. had i just burned some of the most important data to a dvd i would have saved myself a lot of aggravation that night and gotten a lot more sleep. anyways thanks again for the help.