[kingskel]

Hi:

My fantastic 17" iMac was running great. However, I changed a setting or two and it wouldn't boot correctly. So, I decided this was an ideal time to purchase a backup disk. I bought a Firewire 120GB LaCie (guts are a Maxtor) to back up to. It runs faster than the built-in drive, so I've been booting from it. I installed a brand new system, and it was running fine. After installing a few things and repairing permissions, the thing started giving me "Keys out of order". Booting as into single user and running a modified fsck command let me fix this. I backed up all the stuff to the main drive, wiped the Firewire, ran Disk Utility ("appears to be OK"), and installed a brand new system (again). Disk Utility said it was fine, but when I repaired permissions (supposedly a must after installing a new system), I'm getting "Keys out of order" again. The drive makes a clicking sound like it's looking for data. I repair it again, boot into 9 and drag over the good System and Library files from the main drive. Drive Utility says it's fine. Whew.

Question for you:
Should I return this drive? I mean, does it sound like hardware errors could cause this? I also got "I/O error" a few times when repairing. Why would repairing permissions actually _cause_ damage? Ideas? Suggestions? Anything?

[V]

Originally posted by kingskel:
Hi:

My fantastic 17" iMac was running great. However, I changed a setting or two and it wouldn't boot correctly. So, I decided this was an ideal time to purchase a backup disk. I bought a Firewire 120GB LaCie (guts are a Maxtor) to back up to. It runs faster than the built-in drive, so I've been booting from it. I installed a brand new system, and it was running fine. After installing a few things and repairing permissions, the thing started giving me "Keys out of order". Booting as into single user and running a modified fsck command let me fix this. I backed up all the stuff to the main drive, wiped the Firewire, ran Disk Utility ("appears to be OK"), and installed a brand new system (again). Disk Utility said it was fine, but when I repaired permissions (supposedly a must after installing a new system), I'm getting "Keys out of order" again. The drive makes a clicking sound like it's looking for data. I repair it again, boot into 9 and drag over the good System and Library files from the main drive. Drive Utility says it's fine. Whew.

Question for you:
Should I return this drive? I mean, does it sound like hardware errors could cause this? I also got "I/O error" a few times when repairing. Why would repairing permissions actually _cause_ damage? Ideas? Suggestions? Anything?

@ weeks ago my new WD SE got a key out of order. Drive utility couldn't fix it then I reformat it. The "keys out of order" was always coming back! I tried one or two things like drive 10, fsck on single user mode then the drivefinally start to make a lot of clicking, very loud and finally broke totally. So my own experience tell me that if your drive is new and have RECURENT problems, return it.

[chris v]

I've had the "keys out of order" problem on two or three occasions, and DiskWarrior has always been able to straighten it out, even when fsck couldn't. I don't think the problem is hardware-related.

CV