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angelmb · Oct 13, 2006, 03:30 PM

a 80 GB hard disk?, I have done it before but that was with smaller hard disks and under Mac OS 9

So I have DiskWarrior 3 trying to rebuild a 80 GB hard disk from an old Sawtooth G4 hoping that would let the hard disk be mounted again since it is a no-no right now. The 'Rebuilding directory' process started something like six hours ago and it is kinda stalled at 'Step5: Locating Directory Data'. The progress bars (there are two of them) don't move continuously like in previous steps, I guess this 'Locating Directory Data' could be kinda hard to the computer and the Power Mac would be just stressed trying to get it done since if I open System Preferences to avoid the screen saver be launched all goes in slow motion, it took ages to open System Preferences...

I guess I am going to left DiskWarrior working overnight... or would you say that DiskWarrior would have had it done after six hours on it?

BTW: the issue is that the Power Mac can not mount the aforementioned 80 GB. This is the very first issue the Power Mac has with any hard disk -such hard disk was working flawlessly until a couple of days ago-.

angelmb · Oct 13, 2006, 03:49 PM

Fact: if I move/place the mouse pointer over the DiskWarrior window I get the spinning wheel.

angelmb · Oct 14, 2006, 02:48 AM

Still there, so rebuild cancelled, now is Tech Tool Pro who is testing the drive, so far it has found 22 bad blocks while doing a surface scan, which is 50% done... Not cool, huh?

ChrisF · Oct 14, 2006, 04:00 AM

Originally Posted by angelmb

a 80 GB hard disk?, I have done it before but that was with smaller hard disks and under Mac OS 9

DiskWarrior can take many, many hours. It means nothing that you get the spinning wheel. The bad blocks from TechTool are a bad sign, if accurate.

angelmb · Oct 14, 2006, 07:42 AM

I wonder if 18 hours was time enough to get it done… maybe DiskWarrior got stalled due to the bad blocks which seems to be at the very first sectors of the hard disk, TTP reported about it just after the surface scan was started.

Neither TTP nor DW are able to mount the HD. Any advice - suggestion welcome.

bowwowman · Oct 14, 2006, 08:46 AM

Doesn't sound good for the HD, it is probably almost dead. I've used DW on a number of "unmountable" disks, many were fixed, some were not, but the largest being 120GB. It only took about 2.25 hours to completely rebuild. It had 63% of files out of order, but no bad blocks AFAIK ......

angelmb · Oct 15, 2006, 02:19 AM

Well, TechTool Pro says there are as many as 53 Bad blocks… whoa. Is there a way to mark those bad blocks so they are no longer 'available' ?

CharlesS · Oct 15, 2006, 02:50 AM

Well, you could reformat the drive with the "Zero All Data" option, which would remap the bad blocks. However, it's quite likely that your hard drive is hosed, and you'll probably want to replace it. In the meantime, you can try salvaging data off of it with Data Rescue, which might be able to help. Then get rid of the drive and put a new one in.

tooki · Oct 15, 2006, 04:27 AM

In any case, to answer the original question: especially on a disk with bad blocks or other malfunction, it can take a LONG time to rebuild, and it is normal for disk malfunction to cause beachballing -- it does not mean DiskWarrior has crashed. Though it's rare, DiskWarrior can sometimes need a full day or more to do its scan on a malfunctioning disk.

tooki

angelmb · Oct 15, 2006, 07:45 AM

Thanks all.

Well, good news: TTP was able to recover up to 25 GB of data, -the [damaged] hard disk is from a friend of me- I have a nice copy of such stuff on my Mac's secondary hard disk, so this time he was lucky enough though… since it is clear that the hard disk is hosed, I had to disable Spotligh to get a responsive Power Mac.

BTW, the FireWire ports on this Sawtooth are dead, my friend told me that his FireWire burner wasn't any longer working… AFAIK the only hardware attached to the FireWire ports are a FireWire burner plus an 4G iPod. System Profiles can't report any FireWire info.

Oh well, at least the 'very important data lacking a back-up' is OK.

jasong · Oct 15, 2006, 08:57 AM

Glad things worked out. When DW hits a bad block, it will try _forever_ to get the info off. As mentioned earlier, the beachball doesn't mean it has crashed, it hasn't, it just means it is trying that spot over and over and over. I've done two things in this instance. The free and hard one is following these instructions to make an exact duplicate of your bad drive and then use DW to try and fix that (no bad blocks on new disk = no DW getting stuck in those spots)
macosxhints.com - 10.4: Recover a dead hard drive using GNU ddrescue

The expensive and easy (and much faster) method is to buy Data Rescue II which will work with an unmountable drive and copy the files from bad to good disk.

But as you said, backups are key.

angelmb · Oct 15, 2006, 10:02 AM

Oh, nice stuff. It freaks me out, I do back up now and then and haven't had a single issue with hard disks, then almost every friend have had issues with hard disks and of course they don't back up…

BTW, this old G4 was yelling 'clean me', before & after, Radeon 8500 Mac Edition, no, the owner didn't overclock it and hence smoke it

tooki · Oct 15, 2006, 04:23 PM

Originally Posted by jasong

Glad things worked out. When DW hits a bad block, it will try _forever_ to get the info off. As mentioned earlier, the beachball doesn't mean it has crashed, it hasn't, it just means it is trying that spot over and over and over. I've done two things in this instance. The free and hard one is following these instructions to make an exact duplicate of your bad drive and then use DW to try and fix that (no bad blocks on new disk = no DW getting stuck in those spots)
macosxhints.com - 10.4: Recover a dead hard drive using GNU ddrescue

The expensive and easy (and much faster) method is to buy Data Rescue II which will work with an unmountable drive and copy the files from bad to good disk.

But as you said, backups are key.

But DiskWarrior knows what to do with bad blocks. Trying to circumvent them by using another tool is, at best, no better than just letting DiskWarrior do its work.

I just two weeks ago had a drive fail on me, where a number of bad blocks prevented the directory (and one single file) from being read. I tried the Data Rescue II demo, and it basically found a bunch of garbage, all essentially unusable.

So I let DiskWarrior run overnight, and though the bad blocks severely slowed it down, it had no trouble creating a complete and flawless new directory, with which I was able to recover all but one single broken file (which I was able to recover from a backup).

Really, Data Rescue is the absolute last resort, for when Disk Utility and DiskWarrior cannot help. It should not be used until DiskWarrior has announced that it has failed and AlSoft tech support has not been able to do any further magic. (Yes, this does mean that Data Rescue is needed only very seldom, and yes, I am deliberately omitting all disk utilities other than Disk Utility and DiskWarrior, because no other utility does a better job than DW.)

tooki

jasong · Oct 15, 2006, 06:18 PM

Yeah, I let DW run for 4 days one time. Then I did the bit copy to a new drive and DW had it back in business in a few hours. I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm just offering yet another alternative that has worked for me in the past.

angelmb · Oct 16, 2006, 01:26 AM

Originally Posted by jasong

Yeah, I let DW run for 4 days one time.

Color me impressed, here was I thinking than 18 hours was plenty of time… next time I will let DW run at least for the whole weekend.