[logicblue]

Has anyone else had or heard of this problem?

Short-ish version:

Spotlight was causing my FireWire drive to become corrupted (Invalid Volume Header) and un-mount requiring that I repair with with DiskUtility. This didn't happen when I tried to use the search in spotlight...it was related to spotlights indexing or metadata. This would happen very consistantly whenever I tried to copy files to/from the drive or almost any kind of access. Turning off Spotlight in the /etc/hostconfig file returned stability to my drive (!!!).

Longer version:

I keep my iTunes library on an external harddrive and the more music I purchase from the Music Store the more nervous I get about it crashing and losing all that money. Well, my fears were realized recently when iTunes started acting up and I found it was due to my FireWire drive spontaneously un-mounting. I tried to re-mount it but couldn't without running DiskUtility against it to fix an "Invalid Volume Header". The disk would re-mount but the same corruption would happen over and over (disk would suddenly un-mount and have an invalid volume header). I decided it was time to invest in a better quality external drive so went and picked up a LaCie but to my dismay the old drive "crashed" even more often when trying to copy files to the new drive. I spent a long painful night copying a few files, repairing and re-mounting the drive, copying files, etc until I thought I had everything moved over to the new drive. Then as I am importing my old music to a new iTunes library my new drive crashes too!!! This time, however, I notice something in the system.log about mds (metadata services) and Metadata.framework crashing. These are associated with Spotlight. So, I found some directions on how to disable Spotlight and now even my old cruddy firewire drive is working like a champ where as before it was crashing very, very consistantly.

Has anyone else heard of Spotlight causing external harddrives to bomb and have minor corruptions?

[toffe]

I don't know, but it sound scary. I just bougth my first iBook, and also a firewire external harddrive. Havent received the ibook yet so i have not experienced this problem, but i also would like to hear an explanation os solution to this...

[analogika]

Some hard drive enclosures (notably some of the 2.5" momobay ones) appear to have problems with firewire under 10.4.

Or vice versa.

[Jan Van Boghout]

This happened to me in the developer builds a few times, with a standard built-in PowerBook HD. So I doubt it has anything to do with the FireWire enclosure.

[seansf]

i have the exact same problem as you. last night my external hard drive w/ 90gb of music unmounted and i could not get it to re-mount. my problem is that neither disk utility nor disk warrior have been able to fix it. any ideas?

-s

[analogika]

Is it a LaCie Porsche hard drive enclosure?

That is not a Mac OS X problem.

[seansf]

nope, its a maxtor 120gb firewire/usb 2.0 drive. disk utility says there is an invalid volume header. neither disk utility nor disk warrior has been able to fix the volume header.

[Macpilot]

I have an OWC 120gb FW/USB external drive that causes my speakers to crackle when I connect the firewire cable to the iMac.

It has exhibited wierd behavior too. Only on my fairly new iMac. Did not happen on my Powerbook. What is strange is when I plug in my iSight into the same firewire ports, there is no crackling sound.

The disk will fail to mount, and I get disk errors when the iPod is daisy-chained to the drive. I don't know whether this is a problem with my drive or the iMac.

[resuna]

What do you mean "is that a laCie Porsche hard drive enclosure"? What's wrong with them?

[pwrmacg4]

Originally Posted by resuna 

What do you mean "is that a laCie Porsche hard drive enclosure"? What's wrong with them?

test test

[mduell]

Originally Posted by resuna 

What do you mean "is that a laCie Porsche hard drive enclosure"? What's wrong with them?

LaCie's products have a very poor record of causing corruption or completely failing in my book.

[analogika]

Actually, the d2 series are excellent.

The Porsche design series, I do not trust much farther than i can throw them.

Budget products with budget components.