Mac Mini won't post external USB hard drive anymore?

[musicman123]

Greetings there all!

I'm a recent Mac convert and I have been loving it! Video editing on the Mac is incredibly easier than on the PC. Anyhow, I have a new external USB 2.0 case that I installed a brand new 320 GB Western Digital Hard drive in and have been having great success storing massive video files on it for the last 3 weeks. All of a sudden during a DVD output burn, the drive goes offline and the Mac won't even recognize it anymore.

I've rebooted, unplugged, booted to the Mac OS disk and run tests on the internal HD and even plugged the external HD into my PC and I can't find the problem. If I plug the external drive into my PC, it recognizes it and installs the drivers, etc... but won't read anything since it's formatted Mac, but the OS can see it. Any ideas anyone? I'm running a 1.42 Mac Mini with Superdrive, 80 GB and 512 Ram. Bought it new in December and this is the first problem. Thanks!

 

[Laser47]

Does your external hard drive show up in Disk Utility?
If so check to see if you can repair the disk and permissions.

 

[musicman123]

No, I checked Disk Utility, and the hard drive doesn't show up anymore. I'll check again right now, but I still don't think so. Thanks!

 

[CanadaRAM]

Does the case have its own AC power supply or is it bus powered?

If it has a power switch on the drive, can you turn it off, let it settle, then turn it on and hear the mechanism spin up? (I guess it does if the PC offers to format it)

 

[musicman123]

Well, I just checked there in Disk Utility, and it is there now. I could have sworn that it wasn't there earlier. I ran a check on the disk and it came back invalid node selection....

So I told it to fix the problem, but still got invalid node selection. I'm not getting a good feeling about this....

 

[musicman123]

ok, here's the technical wording straight from the Disk Utility when I clicked on verify disk and then on repair disk...


"The underlying task reported failure on exit."

Invalid node structure. Volume check failed.

1 volume could not be repaired because of an error.

 

[musicman123]

Does the case have its own AC power supply or is it bus powered?

If it has a power switch on the drive, can you turn it off, let it settle, then turn it on and hear the mechanism spin up? (I guess it does if the PC offers to format it)

The drive has it's own power supply and when I turn the disk on I do hear the mechanism spin up. Thanks for asking CanadaRAM. Hope this helps

 

[frankblundt]

Do you need the data off it? is formatting it an option? (now that you can see it in Disk Utilty)

You could try Disk Warrior if you want to try and recover the data, but it's not free.

 

[musicman123]

I really do need the data off of it if I can get to it. I have rendered video files on there that I was burning to DVD at the time of its demise, and I really need to get them off before I could format if there is a way to do so. Thanks!

 

[frankblundt]

Disk Warrior's $79, but jolly good, and possibly worth it in situations like this (when you consider your hourly rate for re-doing the work)

 

[musicman123]

Disk Warrior's $79, but jolly good, and possibly worth it in situations like this (when you consider your hourly rate for re-doing the work)

Well, like all computer users, I was hoping for the magical button to push that would make this go away without any additional cost, but this looks like a good option. If anyone has any other ideas, i'm open to them, but with 30+ hours of work into a huge production, $79 doesn't seem so bad. Thanks everyone for your help!

 

[mad jew]

Just to rule out the fact it's not an issue with your mini, try resetting your ports by resetting the PRAM. I think Disk Warrior will have more success but it's worth a try in the meantime.