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Dov · Nov 27, 2001, 01:30 PM

If anyone can help me out, i would greatly apppreciate it: I recently purchased a 100 Gig Firewire External Hard Drive from other world computing. After using it for about a week, all of a sudden, the drive no longer showed up on my mac. WHen i tried recconecting it, i got the message that the drive is unreadable and it asked me if i want to initialize the drive. I called OWC tech support and basically i was told that b/c Firewire is still a relatively new standard, "sometimes these things happen. I've had drives that have worked fine for a year, and i have had some people complain that your problem occured after a week." He said that he thinks the directory was corrupted due to this issue. Basically he said to reinitialize the drive. He also mentioned that b/c of an issue where the drive creates an invisible partition, running Norton on it would cause more harm than good.
SO i have reinitialized the drive, but that answer that i was given bothers me, b/c it doesnt tell me how to AVOID this scenario in the future! Whose to say this wont happen again a month from now!
Is there any way that any if you know of to protect/back up the drive to protect it from a corrupted directory? I know that i cant realy back up 100 GB of data, but from what i understand, the data wasnt corrupted, just the directory: the means of accessing where everything is.
Is there some software that i can use to protect it, or is this just one of the risks of firewire? please help!
dov

Fredo · Nov 27, 2001, 02:30 PM

This may help. http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/index.html

VRL · Nov 29, 2001, 07:01 AM

Actually, I've fixed firewire drive problems using Norton and Tech Tool. (Thankfully.) Have you tried using any utility?

BTW, I used Norton without causing more harm. Not sure what that person means.

jtc · Nov 29, 2001, 05:34 PM

Noooooo! I can't believe he told you to initialize the drive.

I have three external firewire HDs, and this problem pops up every once in a while - I have never had to re-initialize, or lost any data when this happens.

Fredo is right, diskwarrior (or disk first) aid has always fixed the problem for me. Sometimes it's just a matter of shutting down, powering down the FW drive, and starting back up, then powering up the FW drive to get it to reappear on the desktop.

BTW, Did this happen in 9 or X?
As a side note, this used to happen more frequently before I updated the firmware for 2 of the drives (the drives that have the oxford 911 chipset).

[ 11-29-2001: Message edited by: jtc ]

oranjdisc · Nov 29, 2001, 06:03 PM

Speaking as someone who had a 60GB Firewire drive crash and burn, I can tell you...

...STAY AWAY FROM NORTON and TECH TOOL!!

When I bought the drive, I formatted it using the utilities that came with the drive. Later, I ran Tech Tool on it and it completely screwed the drive up. Tech Tool couldn't recover it, rebuild it, do anything. Norton didn't know what to do either.

But DiskWarrior at least got half of my data back. The other half -- poof! -- gone. I found out later that I should have run DiskWarrior BEFORE the others, for the other two probably caused more damange.

Since then I don't use TechTool, Norton, OR the utilities that came with the drive. The Apple firewire drives work fine all by themselves.

Sam I Am · Nov 29, 2001, 06:40 PM

Originally posted by oranjdisc:
<STRONG>Speaking as someone who had a 60GB Firewire drive crash and burn, I can tell you...

...STAY AWAY FROM NORTON and TECH TOOL!!

When I bought the drive, I formatted it using the utilities that came with the drive. Later, I ran Tech Tool on it and it completely screwed the drive up. Tech Tool couldn't recover it, rebuild it, do anything. Norton didn't know what to do either.

But DiskWarrior at least got half of my data back. The other half -- poof! -- gone. I found out later that I should have run DiskWarrior BEFORE the others, for the other two probably caused more damange.

Since then I don't use TechTool, Norton, OR the utilities that came with the drive. The Apple firewire drives work fine all by themselves.</STRONG>

Totally agree... Apple's drivers have been just fine for me ,i have a 40gb ext LaCie drive. And not a problem. But I have found that running Norton is too much of a risk... I've lost stuff because of it twice (due to speed disk crashing with a whole hunk of stuff in ram). I can't say anything about Tech Tool though, so yeah that's my two cents.

[ 11-29-2001: Message edited by: Sam I Am ]

VRL · Nov 30, 2001, 04:29 AM

Originally posted by oranjdisc:
<STRONG>Speaking as someone who had a 60GB Firewire drive crash and burn, I can tell you...

...STAY AWAY FROM NORTON and TECH TOOL!!

</STRONG>

Wow. I haven't had any problems with Norton or Tech Tool. Interesting.

bluehz · Nov 30, 2001, 08:22 AM

This just happened to me last week - A perfectly working 30G FW drive just stopped working. I don't mind reinitializing it if I have to - problem is...I can't even get it to show up enough to reinitialize. Any one have any suggestions??

Here's some of the things I have tried:

Disk First Aid
Disk Utility (OSX)
Disk Warrior
Norton
Tech Tool
FWB HDT
Intech HDST

Nothing will allow me to access the drive in any way. I swapped out the drive with another one and the enclosure works fine - so I am sure its the drive and not the enclosure. I just want my 30G drive back.