Personal Rant against myself...

[crjackson2134]

Well well well, how stupid could I be?

Today I plugged in a known failing USB 3.0 2.5" drive to recover information. I don't realize that I should have un-plugged all other USB drives while messing with this. While my Mac Pro was struggling to mount the drive with 17 bad blocks (it did eventually mount it). It totally trashed over 4 TB of data on my main media drive.

I tried Disk Utility to repair and quickly learned how weak it truly is. TechTools Pro was no help, I couldn't even find a repair option with that App. So I bought Disk Drill Pro (Not Cheap), it couldn't repair the file structure at all. So I bought Disk Warrior which told me it had FIXED the drive. Sadly, it produced 19 files of unrecognized content, and renamed the drive to Untitled. It turned my 4 TB drive into a 3 GB drive. Open Source DiskTest was of no help at all.

I thought I'd be able to recover the thing because the drive was not doing any operations and no files were deleted on that drive. It reported having a bad B tree node, so I thought surely after hundreds of dollars worth of apps something could repair the B tree structure. Not... Hundreds of thousands of files now dust in the wind.

I still have copies of most stored on optical media which will take about 2 months to replace onto my now - Re-partitioned / formatted blank drive.

After the offending drive mounted and the data was retrieved, I promptly removed the drive from the enclosure and performed a sledgehammer-ectomy on the thing. It didn't help matter but it made me feel a little better.

Damn it, sometimes I could shoot myself. Rant over...

Sorry for the distraction, I just wanted to give you all something to laugh at...

 

[dukeblue219]

?
Why would there be any connection between two USB drives connected at the same time? Are they mirrored in such a way that the OS copied bad data from one onto the other?

 

[crjackson2134]

?
Why would there be any connection between two USB drives connected at the same time? Are they mirrored in such a way that the OS copied bad data from one onto the other?

No, not at all. I can't explain why it happened. It was trying to mount the failing drive, and while that was going on it lost connection to the media drive, it just disappeared from my desktop. I saw it happen. It somehow crashed the USB controller circuit I think. It's a mystery to me...

 

[Riwam]

Sorry for your trouble but take it easy

Well well well, how stupid could I be?

Today I plugged in a known failing USB 3.0 2.5" drive to recover information. I don't realize that I should have un-plugged all other USB drives while messing with this. While my Mac Pro was struggling to mount the drive with 17 bad blocks (it did eventually mount it). It totally trashed over 4 TB of data on my main media drive.

I tried Disk Utility to repair and quickly learned how weak it truly is. TechTools Pro was no help, I couldn't even find a repair option with that App. So I bought Disk Drill Pro (Not Cheap), it couldn't repair the file structure at all. So I bought Disk Warrior which told me it had FIXED the drive. Sadly, it produced 19 files of unrecognized content, and renamed the drive to Untitled. It turned my 4 TB drive into a 3 GB drive. Open Source DiskTest was of no help at all.

I thought I'd be able to recover the thing because the drive was not doing any operations and no files were deleted on that drive. It reported having a bad B tree node, so I thought surely after hundreds of dollars worth of apps something could repair the B tree structure. Not... Hundreds of thousands of files now dust in the wind.

I still have copies of most stored on optical media which will take about 2 months to replace onto my now - Re-partitioned / formatted blank drive.

Damn it, sometimes I could shoot myself. Rant over...

Sorry for the distraction, I just wanted to give you all something to laugh at...

.........................................

Thanks God you have backups in optical media and sorry for your trouble to put it all together and have to invest a lot of time.
Nobody will find any reason to laugh at you since most people suffered something similar at one moment or another.
I once erased a full 2 TB drive instead of formatting a USB Stick and then tried as you did with Disk Warrior and other similar software to save what could be saved.
I was not so lucky as you are to have most of the data on optical media and it took me many weeks to reconstruct whatever I could...
So you should not be too hard on yourself. We are all just humans and humans make mistakes.
As long as you do not destroy forever business projects that cost you a fortune and do not risk bankrupcy because of this unhappy event you should think that there are in this world much greater tragedies. I would prefer by far to be in your present unhappy situation that for instance to learn from my doctor that a fatal cancer has been found in me.
So cheer up man. ALL OF US MAKE MISTAKES!
From every mistake we learn something and backups of every important thing are the only way to ptevent total destruction.

 

[flowrider]

Sorry this happened. Actually TechTool Pro has two Data Recovery options under the Test Icon. Volume Rebuild and Data Recovery. And, I don't know how one corrupt volume would affect the others

Lou

 

[crjackson2134]

Sorry this happened. Actually TechTool Pro has two Data Recovery options under the Test Icon. Volume Rebuild and Data Recovery. And, I don't know how one corrupt volume would affect the others

Lou

TechTool didn't even display the drive in question, so there was nothing to select. It wasn't grayed out, it was GONE BYEBYE to TechTool.

It SEEMS like the USB controller was so overwhelmed trying to read the failing drive that it just dropped the media drive, and it doing so the "B Tree node" got destroyed. Now, the strange thing is that I had no ongoing file access to the media drive when this happened. It just disappeared off my desktop never to be seen again until repartition/reformat.

I'll tell you one thing. I wasn't kidding about smashing the drive. I'll never be tempted by it again...

 

[ScottishCaptain]

This is very suspicious.

USB devices cannot send commands to each other without going through a host first. That means there's no way the defective drive "trashed" the media drive. Whatever happened must have happened through Mac OS X, either due to a glitch somewhere or user error.

Personally, I've got several G-Tech USB 2.0 units hanging off a USB hub. I've probably plugged in a hundred or so failing drives into that very same hub for data recovery, and I have never ever ran into the issue of a failing drive trashing an operational one on the same chain. Something is definitely fishy here.

-SC

 

[monokakata]

Try Data Rescue 3. You can try it for free -- if it sees anything recoverable, you can pay and go ahead. Otherwise, you've lost nothing except some time.

It's often the case that one recovery app will work where another won't. So don't give up until you've tried DR 3.

I had a drive that DW couldn't do anything with, but DR 3 could.

 

[Flint Ironstag]

Try Data Rescue 3. You can try it for free -- if it sees anything recoverable, you can pay and go ahead. Otherwise, you've lost nothing except some time.

It's often the case that one recovery app will work where another won't. So don't give up until you've tried DR 3.

I had a drive that DW couldn't do anything with, but DR 3 could.

Same thing with Stellar Phoenix - used it successfully several times.

 

[crjackson2134]

This is very suspicious.

USB devices cannot send commands to each other without going through a host first. That means there's no way the defective drive "trashed" the media drive. Whatever happened must have happened through Mac OS X, either due to a glitch somewhere or user error.

Personally, I've got several G-Tech USB 2.0 units hanging off a USB hub. I've probably plugged in a hundred or so failing drives into that very same hub for data recovery, and I have never ever ran into the issue of a failing drive trashing an operational one on the same chain. Something is definitely fishy here.

-SC

Well I've never seen anything like this happen before either, yet it did. Not sure of the cause but nothing was going on when it happened other that OS X was trying to mount a failing drive. That went on for about 2-3 full minutes until it finally mounted. About half way through the process, the media storage drive vanished from the desktop. I tried to remount the drive using DU as it was visible there, but it told me it couldn't be mounted and needed to be repaired. Repair was attempted but failed due to B Tree node. I powered down fully and rebooted the machine hoping that would help. Obviously it didn't. I removed the failing drive and rebooted again. Still nothing... I tried to repair from the recovery partition utilities. Same results. I tried using command line tools, Linux Tools, and expensive OS X tools. All failed to repair this "B Tree node" problem.

I finally gave up and erased the drive partition and started from scratch. It's all working perfectly now (Minus 3.8 TB of data).

Point out my user error if you see it. I don't what that to happen again. It's the most catastrophic loss of data I've had in 30 years.

----------

Try Data Rescue 3. You can try it for free -- if it sees anything recoverable, you can pay and go ahead. Otherwise, you've lost nothing except some time.

It's often the case that one recovery app will work where another won't. So don't give up until you've tried DR 3.

I had a drive that DW couldn't do anything with, but DR 3 could.

It's too late for that. I've already wiped the drive and I'm in the process of reloading from BU optical media.

----------

Same thing with Stellar Phoenix - used it successfully several times.

Never heard of this one, but I've already spent a lot of ducks on recovery software today.

----------

Here's an update on my freaking day. The wife just told me our clothes dryer died about the same time. I'm going to somehow connect all this together so I can blame her and the kids for this. JK But the dryer did actually go out today too.

 

[brand]

Point out my user error if you see it. I don't what that to happen again. It's the most catastrophic loss of data I've had in 30 years.

Not having an offline data backup of the drive. The physical media does not count since you have to spend tens to hundreds of hours ripping and possibly re-encoding the media. A small percentage of that time would have easily paid for a drive to backup to.

 

[2984839]

Nothing you did should cause the problems you're describing. I don't know why that would happen, unless there's a bug in some software you were using at the time. That stuff can happen.

I would chastise you for not having an offline/offsite backup when you have 4 TB of data, but I think that's just rubbing salt in the would at this point.

 

[crjackson2134]

I actually did have the backup mentioned. The one that got took out as collateral damage was the backup and being moved to primary media drive. The drive that was failing had been the primary drive, but was just replaced with the second drive.

I have another on order but sadly it hasn't arrived yet. I also had another 1TB drive with a lot of the files. So, I've already replaced 3/4 of the media, but I'll have to replace the remaining files from optical media. The optical files are actually backed up files after encoding so it's just going to take some time to copy them all.

I actually lost the main drive and the backup all at the same time. I feel my mistake was plugging in the failing drive with the backup (moved to main media drive) connected, but as already stated, one failure shouldn't have had any affect on the other so I never considered that as a possibility.

It will take me less than 8 hours to transfer the files from optical, but I don't look forward to it, and I won't be doing it all at once. I should have just waited for my new 5T Seagate Plus to arrive.

What started the whole thing was that I purchased TechTool 7, and wanted to see what it could do with the dying drive. It never got that far because the mere act of waiting for the drive to mount is the point at which I lost the good drive.

I was and am backed up, just not in the most convenient or efficient manner.

Patients never was my strong suit. My new drives arrive by Fedex tomorrow. Oh well...

Now for the matter of the clothes dryer

Sorry to bore you all with my admitted stupidity, I just needed to vent and the wife wouldn't have a clue about the subject.

Thanks... I'm relaxed and back on point now.

 

[2984839]

Glad to hear you got most of it back already.

Just out of curiosity, did you have TechTool 7 running when you plugged in the drive? Plugging in a USB device alone should not do what it did, but an application that can interact with hardware like TT7 can could do it if there was a bug in it.

 

[crjackson2134]

Glad to hear you got most of it back already.

Just out of curiosity, did you have TechTool 7 running when you plugged in the drive? Plugging in a USB device alone should not do what it did, but an application that can interact with hardware like TT7 can could do it if there was a bug in it.

No, I had iTunes playing in the background and an open Safari window with one tab showing Macrumors. I can't blame it on TT7 at all. It seemed to me that dance it was doing trying to mount the one drive some how overwhelmed the the card somehow and resulted in the event. Now that's how it appeared, but that could be totally wrong.

Considering my dryer failed, I'm pretty sure it was witchcraft. I've always suspected the spinster next door. She's always looking at me with a voodoo/ zombie stare JK

 

[flowrider]

^^^^Whew, since I'm the one that recommend TT Pro to you in the first place, I would have felt terrible if you thought it was the culprit.

And, I have resurrected drives using the utility. Not recently, but in the distant past.

Lou

 

[crjackson2134]

^^^^Whew, since I'm the one that recommend TT Pro to you in the first place, I would have felt terrible if you thought it was the culprit.

And, I have resurrected drives using the utility. Not recently, but in the distant past.

Lou

No worries. I'm quite sure it had nothing to do with TechTool, except that after installing it, I had a strong urge to see if it could do anything with the dying drive. I couldn't resist the temptation...

 

[OS6-OSX]

You are probably all bought out on utility disks right about now but the one not mentioned is Drive Genius.

 

[Nermal]

Just out of sheer curiosity: If you use dd or similar to raw clone one drive to another, is the system smart enough to assign a new GUID to the clone or do they both end up identical? That's the only thing that I can think of that could make the OS confuse the two drives, but I freely admit that I'm grasping at straws and don't even know whether this is possible.

 

[macs4nw]

…..Sorry for the distraction, I just wanted to give you all something to laugh at...

From your description it's hard to know how this could have happened, but no one on here is laughing at you. Losing data sucks! Consider this incident an unpleasant reminder to revisit or modify your back-up strategy.

 

[Riwam]

Wouldn't it be good to ask Apple's technicians?

From your description it's hard to know how this could have happened, but no one on here is laughing at you. Losing data sucks! Consider this incident an unpleasant reminder to revisit or modify your back-up strategy.

..............................
Since neither you nor anybody else in this thread really understands how this mess happened, wouldn't it be wise to ask Apples technicians to know their opinion?
I do not know if you can ask for free, but if possible I would tell them the whole story and try to learn from them. If it happened once, then (God forbid) it could happen again.
By then you will no doubt have cloned the main drive and made all the possible backups in the world!
Still it would be useful for yourself and for others to understand HOW AND WHY this happened.
I do believe in "hidden forces" and "bad eye"...but technical explanations are by far more useful than supernatural ones, even if they might exist...
I join the others who congratulated you for already having saved almost all of the lost data.

 

[crjackson2134]

From your description it's hard to know how this could have happened, but no one on here is laughing at you. Losing data sucks! Consider this incident an unpleasant reminder to revisit or modify your back-up strategy.

Yeah that's all I can do at this point.

 

[crjackson2134]

You are probably all bought out on utility disks right about now but the one not mentioned is Drive Genius.

I'm rather disappointed at the recovery software at this point. If I had just waited one more day for my new drives to arrive before playing around with the bad one perhaps I would have saved myself some money and time. Lesson learned.

 

[crjackson2134]

..............................
Since neither you nor anybody else in this thread really understands how this mess happened, wouldn't it be wise to ask Apples technicians to know their opinion?
I do not know if you can ask for free, but if possible I would tell them the whole story and try to learn from them. If it happened once, then (God forbid) it could happen again.
By then you will no doubt have cloned the main drive and made all the possible backups in the world!
Still it would be useful for yourself and for others to understand HOW AND WHY this happened.
I do believe in "hidden forces" and "bad eye"...but technical explanations are by far more useful than supernatural ones, even if they might exist...
I join the others who congratulated you for already having saved almost all of the lost data.

One thing I've learned about computers and other electronics over the years is that connecting defective components can cause unpredictable results.

Who knows, perhaps there was a glitch in the controller of the bad drive that spiked or shorted somehow that disrupted the USB controller and the dominos fell.

It's done and I'm moving forward with the recovery. I'm pausing with that process for now as I wait for the Fedex truck to arrive with several goodies.

 

[flowrider]

I have a question - Do you use a UPS?

Lou