[harrisjamieh]

I use a LaCie Bigger Disk, with a 1TB capacity for video editing at school. Recently I had a project to edit that was filmed accross 48 mini-DV tapes, each with 30 minutes on them. During the long and laborious task of capturing them, I took the hard drive home to carry on capturing at night, as all 48 tapes had to be captured in 1 week as the tapes were needed to film another project. Because of this, I had no choice other than to capture to the LaCie drive, as the internal drive on the Mac I use is only a 250, and the whole captured project ended up at 350 gig.

ANYWAY.. I have edited a third of the project, and went to school this morning to find, to my horro, the LaCie drive sitting there, making some truely awful noises. I tried restarting the disk, reconnecting etc, and eventually, the disk would not mount, but DID show up in disk utility. Disk utility showed the capacity as 700 GB, which suggests that 1 of the 4 internal drives has failed. I tried 'reparing' the disk using disk utility, but that failed.

What can I do? If the drive goes back to LaCie they will wipe it. If I open up the HD to get the physical drives out and copy the data from the 3 working physical drives, I void the warrenty which is also included in 3 years of AppleCare.

I guess this teaches me to backup my stuff, but this wasn't really an option, as I literally had no-where to back it up to. We are not looking into getting 2 x 400 internals, and using a backup RAID to help security.

Anyway, anyone got any ideas on how to save my work?!?!!?!?

[Blubby]

You've made a classic school boy error, capturing to an external drive an relying on one. That should teach you for trusting one. NEVER EVER use an external drive, they are unreliable and WILL fail.

[brassplayersrock²]

did you use anything to protect the drive when you were transporting it? if there was any bad jolts than one of the heads or perhaps all would fail if its a good enough jolt. the first reply to your OP was somewhat correct, drives do eventually fail, but not to trust them at all? nah, in the last 4 years i've had 3 internal drives fail on me, and these were in towers, non moving, just failed, and i did take care of them. my laCie 250 gig and 500 gigs have been very very reliable for me and i even bought a super foam briefcase thats supposed to be for chess sets but my drives fit perfectly in them to carry the drives from school to dorm and all over no problems at all with the drives.

as to other ways of saving THAT much info. DVD-rs. It'll be A LOT but with a good sharpie and filing system, itll work. hmm, or does your computer support double sidded disks? theses work for data saving right? i'm not possitive

[Dark Helmet]

Your LaCie drives are included in your Applecare?

[harrisjamieh]

Originally Posted by Blubby

You've made a classic school boy error, capturing to an external drive an relying on one. That should teach you for trusting one. NEVER EVER use an external drive, they are unreliable and WILL fail.

Well yes, I am a school boy, but I had no choice - I had 1 week to capture all 48 tapes, as they all needed to be re-used 1 week after the event, and the LaCie was the only drive in school big enough. The second largest HD is a 250 which is inside the Mac, with the rest being around 80 in all the school PCs