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External Drive Issue. Genius Wanted!

O

orion star

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 6, 2006
8
0
San Francisco
Hey Mac Friends,

I ran into a little issue and am hoping that there is someone one out there generous enough to share their genius.

Here is the very basic issue:
I had an external firewire hard drive titled "Art". After restarting my computer with the external Hard Drive connected, I am prompted with a warning stating... "You have inserted a disk containing no volumes that Mac OS X can read. To continue with the disk inserted, click ignore." Then there are the options to initialize or ignore. Out of fear of losing any data I chose "ignore".

The Pieces and Parts:
I'm working with a 1.2 Ghz g4 ibook with 768 MB of ram running on OS 10.3.9. The hard drive is a 280 GB Seagate Drive (might be western digital, I will double check and update if so). My external enclosure is a "NexStar.2".

Prior to:
My Protools software was having trouble running files on the Hard Drive, a bit sluggish. At one point I foolishly disconnected the drive with out ejecting it, which prompted the warning about ejecting mounted drives. I plugged the drive back in and it did remount as "art". I then restarted my computer with the drive attached, in an attempt to see if it might take care of the sluggish issue I was having. After OS X booted, I was prompted with the warning... "You have inserted a disk containing no volumes that Mac OS X can read. To continue with the disk inserted, click ignore."

Thus Far:
#-after hitting ignore on the prompt I opened up disk utility and noticed that the drive was being recognized as: 279.5 GB Prolific Prolific Combo Drive" with the volume titles "disk1s3" as opposed to its original name "art". I proceeded to verify the disk and was prompted with:
""""""
Verifying volume “disk1s3”
Volume check failed.

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit (-9972)

1 volume checked
0 HFS volumes verified
1 volume failed verification
""""""
Attempting to repair renders a similar response.

#-When running Disk Warrior the disk comes up as "Unknown Disk" stating "Directory cannot be rebuilt, the disk format is unsupported"

#-When running Data Rescue II quick scan I was prompted with "The Quick Scan was unable to find any files. You should try a Thorough Scan." FYI, the dive is recognized as "ST330063 1A Media" with a volume title of "Apple_HFS_Untitled_2".

What Now:
I will be performing a Thorough Scan in Data Rescue II tonight, and was curios in if anyone may have any ideas prior to. I am hoping that my drive wasn't completely erased... damn that would suck... so again any ideas or help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Orion
 
restart the machine and see if it mounts. IF not, shut down the machine, unplug the firewire drive, restart the machine, when you get to your desktop, plug it back in.

If this fails, try using Disk Warrior or Techtool Pro to check the HD. I doubt you did any damage to it, the machine is just a little confused right now.
 
thus far

Onizuka said:
restart the machine and see if it mounts. IF not, shut down the machine, unplug the firewire drive, restart the machine, when you get to your desktop, plug it back in.

If this fails, try using Disk Warrior or Techtool Pro to check the HD. I doubt you did any damage to it, the machine is just a little confused right now.
Click to expand...

I have already tried running Disk Warrios and Data Rescue II, as posted. I am going to hold off on Techtool Pro for now, I am hesitating on throwing down another $100 hoping to resolve with what I have at this point. I have also already tried restarting the computer and unplugging/power cycling the drive. Let me know if you have any other ideas.

Orion
 
Hmmmm. Do you have another available machine to test it on, or try switching firewire ports?

edit: there were known issues with OS X 10.4.3 with firewire drives not mounting. Also I just realized we have the same enclosure. :D The enclosure itself is a little, well, crappy. It's designed pretty poorly but allows good heat dissipation.

Are the blue lights active on the front?

In FINDER>PREFERENCES>SIDEBAR is Hard Disks checked? Or in FINDER>PREFERENCES>GENERAL is the show HD's on desktop checked?

Also, have you tried the OS X boot disc to see if the disk shows up there?
 
my girlfriends ibook

I will be going to my girl friends for dinner. I will give her computer a try before doing a detailed scan in Data Rescue II... she is opperating on 10.4.
 
Western Digitals are notorious for failures, so if it's one of those, it could be dead (though you can still recover the data, there are several ways to do it; search around sourceforge.net and versiontracker.com for tools for this). As a previous poster mentioned, use disk warrior first, it might just be a catalog tree issue. I hate that you can't check SMART on a firewire drive...

EDIT: Also, WD are very good about replacing dead drives, they replaced my dead 200 external with a working 250. I lost all the data that was damaged, though (was able to back up what wasn't corrupt)...
 
orion star said:
#-When running Disk Warrior the disk comes up as "Unknown Disk" stating "Directory cannot be rebuilt, the disk format is unsupported"

#-When running Data Rescue II quick scan I was prompted with "The Quick Scan was unable to find any files. You should try a Thorough Scan." FYI, the dive is recognized as "ST330063 1A Media" with a volume title of "Apple_HFS_Untitled_2".
Click to expand...

I tried the above mentioned earlier. And also I did confirm that it is a Seagate drive. I also tried hooking it up to my girlfriends computer and was promted with the same "initialize/ignore" option. I wll run the Thorough Scan through Data Rescue II. It will take about 5 hours... damn, i have my fingers crossed.

Also, I don't think the drive is dead... it is as if it has been erased, like it needs to be re-initialized.
 
Dumb question, but there wasn't anything magnetic near the drive, was there? For example, I've heard reports that things like ionizers can have disastrous effects on hard drives (though I don't think it's the same as a magnet)...

You do seem to have a pickle on your hands, to be sure. Let us know what data rescue finds.
 
You had me think for a second... but thankfully, nothing magnetic in my laptop and hard drive bag/case. The issue actually took place when I was working at a cafe. I have 30 minutes left, I'm hoping that Data Rescue finds the files. Thanks for the support thus far.

Orion
 
Ok late last night... Data Recovery II did recognize the files on the hard drive. Now I am only stuck with having to wait to purchase the software, being that I was working with the demo version (which only allows you to view the files and recovery one of them). So before I throw down another $100 down, being that I purchased Disk Warrior and it didn't resolve the issue, I will wait till I get a chance to use my brother's Norton Disk tools. I have several weeks before then, so if anyone else has any other ideas... feel free to share. The good news is it looks like I will be able to get my software back, it will only cost me the price of Data Recovery II. I will update the thread on the final results, hopefully in the future this thread will help someone with a similar issue.
Thanks again,
Orion
 
Check sourceforge or versiontracker for an app that might work similarly. Another random thought, and no logical reason this could work, but can your comp boot into os9? If so, I'd give this a try; 99.99% chance it will do nothing, but worth the five minutes it would take...

And if you want to resell your Disc Warrior (worth keeping, btw, but just in case), I might be interested if I can scrounge up the money.
 
Here is the wrap up on the Hard Drive issue. I was able to get a hold of Norton System works 3.0, which wasn't able to recognize the disk. I then went ahead and purchased Data Rescue II which ran at $111 after tax and shipping, my promotional code for a discount wasn't working for some reason.

Data Rescue was able to see the files, but unfortunately many of them were corrupt. The good news is that I did have backups of the FCP movie projects. I lost most of my Protools projects being that the biggest issue was with AIFF files... only about the first 20% of each file was intact, it was a trip, the last 80% of the corrupt files was loud static.

I was able to acquire enough of one Protools project to justify the expenditures. Its one of my favorite songs. I will have to redo the vocals, but I still have all of the midi files and the entire guitar track. This makes me think that something was seriously wrong with the directories and drive.

I have since reinitialized the drive and under disk utility it appears to be running ok. So on the part of booting in OS 9, I do have an old mac in storage, but since I initialized I'm a little to late for that. It would of been worth a try though.

I should be receiving the Disk Warrior package by the end of the week. IF anything, on the terms of being preventative, it sounds like Disk Warrior is the one worth keeping. I'm not sure if I will need Data Rescue II again. More or less curious or to consider, Disconap... would you like to make an offer?

Anyhow, thanks for all the help!!! Hopefully this info will be of use to a mac user in the future.

Orion
 
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