[wynn]

Hi everyone,

I have 80gig maxtor drive inside of a firewire external enclosure. There is one folder that has about 5 gigs of information. Whenever I open the folder, the OS crashes.

I have tried opening the folder on:

OS X 10.2.6
OS X 10.2.8 (which I'm on now)
OS 9.2.2 - which freezes the computer completely

I've verified and repaired the drive and all is supposedly well.

It seems like there is a corrupt file in the folder because I can access every other folder on the external drive outside of that folder that keeps crashing.

Btw, I'm using a 1ghz tibook w/ 1gig of ram.

I even tried mounting the the drive on a pc box, but I think the disk is formatted for mac standard(? -os 9).

Thank you much! I really need these files.

[asxless]

Originally posted by wynn:
I have 80gig maxtor drive inside of a firewire external enclosure....

You may have already found the cause.

This may be a hardware, not an OS X problem. If you search Mac hardware forums you will find a lot of info on Maxtor firewire drives. Most of it is not flattering.

FWIW I have a Maxtor 80 GB drive that I no longer use because it became so unreliable It started with having trouble accessing parts of the directory structure and progressed to not being able to mount whole partitions. Running First Aid (in the Disk Utility) would some times allow recovery of the info. Sometimes switching to OS 9 would allow recovery of the data. But eventually even after a complete erase, reformat and partition, it now regularly hangs any Mac I attached it to whether it is running OS X or OS 9

-- asxless in iLand

[SMacTech]

Originally posted by wynn:
Hi everyone,
Thank you much! I really need these files.

Have you tried viewing the folder in terminal? Possibly you can copy them out to another folder one at a time.
I have seen file corruption make the Finder choke or crash only once. I was able to delete the offending file in terminal.

[wynn]

asxless: thanks for the reply. I had the same issues as well, and came to the conclusion that it was a faulty case, rather than a faulty drive. The drive is now in another firewire case. I should have made that clear in the original post. Do you think it could be the hard drive? I'm thinking that the files got corrupted when the drive was in the original maxtor case.

hmm...

Originally posted by asxless:
You may have already found the cause.

This may be a hardware, not an OS X problem. If you search Mac hardware forums you will find a lot of info on Maxtor firewire drives. Most of it is not flattering.

FWIW I have a Maxtor 80 GB drive that I no longer use because it became so unreliable It started with having trouble accessing parts of the directory structure and progressed to not being able to mount whole partitions. Running First Aid (in the Disk Utility) would some times allow recovery of the info. Sometimes switching to OS 9 would allow recovery of the data. But eventually even after a complete erase, reformat and partition, it now regularly hangs any Mac I attached it to whether it is running OS X or OS 9

-- asxless in iLand

[wynn]

Originally posted by SMacTech:
Have you tried viewing the folder in terminal? Possibly you can copy them out to another folder one at a time.
I have seen file corruption make the Finder choke or crash only once. I was able to delete the offending file in terminal.

Thanks for the info. I will give that a try. Is there a good site to go to for a command list for terminal?

[SMacTech]

Originally posted by wynn:
Thanks for the info. I will give that a try. Is there a good site to go to for a command list for terminal?

Start here or Google search it

[wynn]

Originally posted by SMacTech:
Start here or Google search it

Thank you very much.

[asxless]

Originally posted by wynn:
asxless: thanks for the reply. I had the same issues as well, and came to the conclusion that it was a faulty case, rather than a faulty drive. The drive is now in another firewire case. I should have made that clear in the original post. Do you think it could be the hard drive? I'm thinking that the files got corrupted when the drive was in the original maxtor case.

hmm...

I agree that the directory / files were probably corrupted while the drive was in the Maxtor case.

FWIW I think the problem with Maxtor 'drives' is really a firewire interface problem. But it could be a problem with the way the drive itself handles the write caches. Or a combination of the two. BTW What I think happens is that the Maxtor 'drive' does not always write the cache to disk when it is unmounted or losses connectivity due to the firewire interface 'hanging'. This is just a _guess_ not based on extensive testing, so I could be wrong.

Regardless I think SMacTech's advise to try command line access to the files is your best bet to recover the data. Just open a terminal and type cd followed by a space, then drag the offending folder onto the Terminal window. The Terminal will complete the change directory command with the correct full path to that directory. Then type ls to see a list of the contents. If it still hasn't hung try cp to copy each file to a good drive.

good luck -- asxless

[wynn]

Quick update. Just wanted to thank you all for the advice. I ran terminal and was able to recover about 60% of the files using 'ditto'. It took about 12 hours to copy 2.6 gigs of info. Once copied, I was able to open each of the files.

It could have been huge loss for me. Thanks again.

[wadesworld]

I had a Firewire drive start exhibiting the same behavior. Eventually I decided the Firewire controller inside the enclosure must be bad. Once I bought a new enclosure and moved the drive over, all the problems disappeared.

Wade

[asxless]

Originally posted by wynn:
Quick update. Just wanted to thank you all for the advice. I ran terminal and was able to recover about 60% of the files using 'ditto'. It took about 12 hours to copy 2.6 gigs of info. Once copied, I was able to open each of the files.

It could have been huge loss for me. Thanks again.

It's good to hear that the CLI approached worked, at least for 60% of the files.

Just curious, but what happened when you tried to 'ditto' the other 40% of the files? Were you unable to copy these files using 'ditto'? or were the files not usable after they were copied using 'ditto'?

-- asxless in iLand

[wynn]

I don't remember the exact terminology, but something to the effect of 'error copying [filename] input/output error'.

Thanks again