[MinM]

Has anyone else had this problem?

In November, I bought a LaCie 30GB FireWire HD, which I hooked up to my iMac DVSE/400. It's 7200RPM, and should be more than fast enough to play back my iMovie files.

I first noticed a problem when I tried to export a movie to my camera from the FW drive. At one point (I tried multiple times, and it was the same point everytime), everything stops, and a message comes on the screen telling me that the disk is responding slowly, and cannot play back the file, or that the file may be corrupted. Okay, so I can't export the movie from my FW drive, I'll copy it back to the internal drive and export it from there.

While copying certain files, messages come up telling me that the file could not be copied, because it is corrupted. I assume that these are the files that cannot be played back in iMovie.

This is not an isolated incedent, it happens on many of my longer movies. What should I do?

[This message has been edited by MinM (edited 05-30-2001).]

[MAlan]

This is most disconcerting considering I also have a LaCie firewire drive albeit a 40 GB and an iMac DV/SE 400. I would definitely call LaCie. However, I had a very strange problem once that may be totally unrelated to this post nevertheless it may help. I had left file sharing and web sharing on once and ran into problems copying files in OS 9. Every file was in use for some reason. I was trying to copy files from a zip disk to the LaCie drive and also from a CD to the LaCie drive. Also copying files from the LaCie drive was a problem.

So check if you have file sharing or web sharing on. Also, you might try just trying the other firewire port on your iMac. I have found one of them to be a little flaky at times.

One other suggestion might be formatting of the drive. The first thing I did when I bought the drive is to reformat and repartition. I have 2 10 Gig partitions and 1 20 gig. Since you are doing movies this might not be practical since we all know that Movies take up mucho space.

Good luck.

[MinM]

Thanks for the response.

I have web sharing on, but not file sharing.

I have made full copies of all my movies on DV tape, so I think I'll reformat and see if it helps, and if it still doesn't work properly, I'll call LaCie. My only concern with that, though, is that they might think I'm trying a scam if I call so long after buying it.

[Feathers]

This is(in part) a firewire bus bandwidth issue because you have essentially TWO external firewire peripherals running at the same time, the HD and the Camera. This is exactly why iMovie captures to the internal drive!

The corruption issue sounds like it may be exactly that, nothing specifically to do with DV at all. I'd run DiskDoctor or DiskWarrior or TechToolPro on the drive. Norton's is probably the best one for locating and ring-fencing bad sectors but Diskwarrior will be better for reconstructing the directorys so that those sectors are not written to again in the future. DV is one of the few computer tasks that requires enormous amounts of contiguous, flawless disk space so a single bad sector can be disastrous.